WORDS BY NEIL POLLACK
PHOTOGRAPHY BY HENRY LEUTWYLER
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

These stunning, beautiful, and startlingly intimate photographs were taken in New York City three weeks after Florence Griffith Joyner, who her adoring public called Flo-Jo, won four track medals at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. They’re the work of Henry Leutwyler, a Swiss photographer who persistently chased Flo-Jo and her husband and manager Al Joyner, across three continents. Only one photograph from that session ever got published, in a spread in French Glamour on “the world’s fastest women.”

Leutwyler clearly remembers that eight-hour shoot in New York nearly 30 years ago. Access to Flo-Jo wasn’t won easily, he says. “She was up for a James Bond movie, had just won four medals, she was a superstar. Flo-Jo came with her medals, she came with her running gear, and also a ball gown. Al was in a tux. I wanted them to dance together,” he says. “It was incredible that it actually happened.”

At the time, Flo-Jo was the sports world’s biggest celebrity. She had her medals, but she’d also set world records in the women’s 100- and 200-meter races, the former at the Olympic time trials and the latter at the Olympics themselves. She was one of the greatest athletes of her time, but that wasn’t precisely what distinguished her—she also brought a special element of style to the proceedings. There was something very personal about the way she conducted herself on the track. No one else acted like her. And, certainly, no one else looked like her.

It’s hard to imagine now, in an era when athletes’ “body issues” get hyper-analyzed across the sports spectrum, how radical Flo-Jo was at the time. Before she came along, female athletes were relegated to two basic types: butch and sexually unthreatening, like Martina Navratilova, Billie Jean King, and mother of them all, Babe Didrickson; or pinup-girl adorable, like Chris Evert and various Olympic gymnasts.

Flo-Jo was different, muscular, even freakish. She had legs like pistons, extreme musculature of the type that’s not commonplace on women even now. In the ’80s, it was like looking at a creature from the future.

But Flo-Jo also had hyper-feminine qualities. She ran with four-inch-plus nails painted in the colors of the American flag, and with hair big enough that it should have slowed her down by at least a second. She wore lace. There was her incredible one-legged bodysuit, a style that even today seems fashion-forward. It was a suit that purposefully showed off her most notable physical feature, immortalized in one of the greatest pop songs of all time. “You can have them bimbos,” Sir Mix-A-Lot would sing on the 1992 smash “Baby’s Got Back,” “I want my women like Flo-Jo.” She was on her way to becoming a new feminine archetype.

Her life had an almost melodramatic arc. The seventh of 11 kids, she grew up Florence Griffith in a housing project in Watts. When she was five years old, still living in the Mojave Desert with her family, her father dared her to chase jackrabbits, and she caught one. She had a distinguished though not world-beating career as a college sprinter, and didn’t even qualify for the boycotted 1980 Olympics. At age 25, in the 1984 games in Los Angeles, she took a silver medal in the 200 meters, losing by more than two-tenths of a second to Valerie Brisco-Hooks.

Desperately broke, she went to work as a bank teller, braiding hair on the side for extra money. Meanwhile, she kept training. In October 1987, she married triple jumper Al Joyner, whose sister, world champion heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, was married to Flo-Jo’s future track coach, Bob Kersee. At the time, she was the least famous member of track and field’s “first family.” That was about to change.

At the 1988 US Olympic trials in Indianapolis, Flo-Jo came out of nowhere to smash the previous world record in the 100-meter dash, finishing it in an unimaginable 10.49 seconds. “Nobody can run that fast,” the announcer stammered into his microphone. There followed a hard-to-understand controversy about wind speed, but Flo-Jo’s record held, and a glamorous legend was born.

Between the trials and the Olympics, Flo-Jo fired Kersee and hired her husband as her new conditioning coach. Much hand wringing followed, and it didn’t stop when, three months later, Flo-Jo won three gold medals in Seoul. That was the year that Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his medals after testing positive for steroids. Pretty much everyone assumed that Flo-Jo had done the same. She’d been a good, but not exceptional, sprinter for her entire career, and then out of nowhere she put a hammerlock on two records. Accusations of doping spread quickly.

At the time, the International Olympic Committee’s chief doctor said, “We performed all possible and imaginable analyses on her. There should not be the slightest suspicion.” But there was suspicion aplenty. An American sprinter named Darrell Robinson told a German magazine that Flo-Jo bought human-growth hormone from him. Confronting Robinson on the Today show, Flo-Jo called him a “compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic.”

To this day, Al Joyner claims that Flo-Jo’s improved performance was largely due to an intense program of leg curls on a machine that they bought at Kmart. He told CNN in 2012, “I trained her like a man. We did a lot of things then that they do now with nutrition. The things that separated her were her mental focus and toughness. She was humble. My wife was great then and she is great now.”

There’s tangible video evidence of her greatness. The video of Flo-Jo’s world-record shattering Olympic 200-meter race is on YouTube for everyone to see. Even though we’ve known the results for more than 30 years, it’s still shocking, a signature race that no one else could have run. She doesn’t burst out of the blocks looking any more powerful and special than any of the other runners. And as the race moves through the first third, it looks like she might not have a shot to win. But when she turns the corner out of the shadows, her mighty thighs effortlessly churning, you realize that you’re watching the fastest woman who ever lived.

And then it was over. Four months after the Olympics, Flo-Jo retired, and never competed on a track again. She wrote children’s books, had a daughter, and designed a new uniform for the Indiana Pacers. In September 1998, she suffered a severe epileptic seizure while sleeping at her home in California, and died. The autopsy showed no performance-enhancing drugs of any kind in her system. She’d been tested for steroids innumerable times, never once positive.

The account of Flo-Jo’s funeral in the LA Times is incalculably sad. Her seven-year-old daughter sang a Christian hymn. “She just ran, and ran, and ran. She ran spectacular races,” Kersee told a crowd of 1,500 as he stood beneath an Olympic flag. “What was in her heart, every time she laced up her spikes, was Jesus.” A vice-president of the IOC called her “a great Olympian.” A fan who’d once met Flo-Jo in a mall said, “She gave a whole new dimension to the sport and opened it up to women.” Al Joyner called her “my loving wife and one of the world’s greatest moms.”

These photographs capture that wonderful human side of Flo-Jo, proud and noble, but show also a tender, personal look at an athlete at the most intense and successful point in her life. Leutwyler says he intended to do most of the shoot on a rooftop, but it rained that day. Instead, Flo-Jo and Joyner sat around and drank coffee while Leutwyler set up a makeshift studio inside.

“They were chit-chatting, listening to music, making phone calls,” he says. “They were the kindest, least demanding people. They were just like you and me, normal people in the studio, loving each other and having a lot of fun. It was everything they wanted to do.”

It was a long shoot, and it came at the end of Flo-Jo’s epic Olympic adventure. “She was so exhausted at the end of the day that she fell asleep fully dressed, bending over on a table” says Leutwyler. “Can you imagine having to ask Flo-Jo and her husband to dress up and dance? And then they did it. They danced for half an hour.”

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY ERIC NUSBAUM
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM VILLACIN
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

“Flying makes me feel like a sex maniac in a whorehouse with a stack of hundred-dollar bills.”

All the signs were there from the time Florence Leontine Lowe was a little girl. She loved horses and palling around with her grandfather, Thaddeus. They were always up to something, whether at the estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains or at the other estate overlooking the vast Pacific in Laguna Beach. This was where and how Florence lived: wrapped up in immense wealth and its accompanying societal pressures, but also right on the edge of raw nature. This was who she was—unwilling to be confined.

Thaddeus Lowe had been an important man, a self-taught “scientist” who dreamed of piloting a hot air balloon across the Atlantic. During the Civil War, he founded the US Army Balloon Corps, which gathered intelligence soaring over Confederate camps. In the ensuing decades, he invented industrial scale ice machines, made a fortune, and moved to Los Angeles. Florence was his favorite grandchild. In 1910, Thaddeus took her to see the future. Human ingenuity had blown right past his balloon dreams. America’s first-ever national aviation exhibition had come to Los Angeles. Thaddeus and Florence sat together in a grandstand and watched the airplanes take off as if by magic. The engines roared in their ears. The smell of burning oil lingered in the air. Florence was not quite nine years old.

The very notion of an airplane was still preposterous. It represented the opposite of Florence’s constricted life. She would spend her teenage years in open rebellion, bouncing between reform schools, before ultimately being married off by her parents to an Episcopalian minister named Rankin Barnes. He was a decent fellow, but it was a loveless marriage. They had a single intimate encounter, and it produced a boy they called Billy.

Florence Barnes wasn’t interested in marriage or motherhood. She wanted no part of high society and its responsibilities. When her mother died, Florence stopped pretending. She left Rankin behind and let the nurses raise Billy. She partied in Hollywood. She worked as a trick rider on movie productions and a stunt double for the charismatic evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, performing equestrian feats at tent revivals.

In 1927, Florence cut off her hair, disguised herself as a man, and enlisted as a crewman on a boat sailing for Mexico—only to find herself caught up in a gun-smuggling operation. At anchor in San Blas, she took off with another American for the mainland. They tramped across Mexico for four months, initially on a beaten-down horse and a stumpy old donkey. The story goes that she told her friend that he looked like Don Quixote, and—not exactly a literary type—he replied that she looked like Pancho Sanza. By the time she made it back to Los Angeles, Pancho had become more than just her name; it had become her identity.

Soon after she got back, Pancho followed a cousin to a nearby airfield and talked the instructor into giving her a lesson. It had been nearly two decades since her grandfather had taken her to that air show when she was a girl. Charles Lindbergh had just made his famous Atlantic passage. The instructor tried to scare Pancho off with a few dips and barrel rolls. But fear was not one of Pancho’s abiding emotions. Even when the instructor lost control, and their plane almost crashed, Pancho only laughed. She thought it was all part of the act. A few weeks later, she had her pilot’s license, number 3,522, signed by the president of the National Aeronautic Association of the United States: Orville Wright.

II.

To Pancho Barnes, flying a plane was a spiritual act. When she got into the air, she was more herself than she ever could be on the ground: fearless and calm under pressure. She also had a knack for mechanical work and was happy to spend hours repairing and maintaining her planes and bullshitting with the men who hung around the airfields and hangers that dotted the Southern California landscape. These were her people—foul-mouthed, daring, and full of stories.

There was no “normal” way to have a career as a pilot in the early days of flight. The job was one you had to make yourself—especially as a woman. Pancho bought her first plane, a Travel Air Speedwing, from the director Howard Hawks. She created a barnstorming show called “The Pancho Barnes Flying Mystery Circus of the Air” complete with wing walking and skydiving. She also lived off her family’s fortune: spending whatever she needed to support her flying habit and also to keep herself in the finest clothes, fastest cars, and most expensive liquor.

In 1929, Pancho raced in the first-ever Women’s Air Derby. The Derby, a grueling marathon that would take the fliers from Santa Monica to Cleveland over the course of 17 stops, was a national phenomenon. The newsreel footage from kickoff shows a lineup of twenty women, including Pancho’s friendly rival, Amelia Earhart, all preparing to take off—all careful to look feminine and proper for the cameras, and then Pancho Barnes, cigar in hand, with her short hair and her men’s flying outfit grinning in the middle of everything.

Pancho started out well, but a week into the race, as she was landing in Pecos, Texas, a car drove into her path on the runway. Nobody was hurt in the crash, but her plane was wrecked. The answer, of course, was to buy a new one: a Travel Air Type R Mystery Ship. There were only three of its kind in the world—and they were notoriously fast. Pancho signed a sponsorship deal with Union Oil. They painted their logo on the side of the Mystery Ship and put her in magazine ads.

“More than anything, Pancho liked to fly fast,” wrote one of her biographers, Laurie Kessler. In 1930, Pancho set out to break the women’s speed record of 185 MPH held by Earhart. On her first attempt, she came up just short. On her second, Pancho brought the Mystery Ship to 196.2 MPH.

Pancho’s skill as a pilot and as a self-promoter made her an ideal candidate to work as a test pilot. Major airplane manufacturers, including Bach, Lockheed, and Beechcraft, hired her to do the risky work of trying out new planes and inaugurating new routes. There was an element of sexism to this, which Pancho understood clearly. The idea was that a plane safe enough for a woman to fly would certainly be fit for a man. But Pancho also understood that the fact that she was a woman didn’t make the flights she was making any less treacherous.

The same went for her work in Holly wood. When Howard Hughes decided he wanted to convert his silent aerial epic Hell’s Angels into a talkie, he suspended a recording device from a balloon high in the sky over the Mojave Desert. Pancho buzzed the recorder with her Mystery Ship to imitate the noises the warplanes in Hughes’ film would make. For years, Pancho was the only woman working as a stunt pilot. She loved being around her showbiz friends and reveled in the technical flying challenges the movies demanded. But she was also frustrated by the low pay and the studio’s tendency to manipulate pilots into underbidding each other for extremely dangerous work. So Pancho organized the first stunt pilot union, the Association of Motion Picture Pilots. The AMPP successfully set up a minimum wage scale and earned improved safety conditions for movie pilots. They were also a notoriously reckless and insular boy’s club: a group of strutting alphas with big egos, big appetites, and volatile personalities. In other words, Pancho fit right in.

Pancho understood the value of money in a theoretical way, but not as it applied to her life. As the Great Depression deepened, she did not slow down her spending. The all-night open bar bacchanalias continued at her mansions. She had been raised with the idea that her family’s fortune was endless. But by the mid-1930s, Pancho had burned through everything: selling off goods and properties in an attempt to maintain a lifestyle that didn’t even make sense anymore. There was nobody who could keep up with it anyway. Finally, she even sold the Mystery Ship.

The vast desert beyond the LA basin had always been a place of big skies and endless possibilities for Pancho. In an act of desperation, Pancho traded an apartment building the family still owned in Hollywood for an 80-acre horse ranch.

III.

Two nights before he became the first person to break the sound barrier, Chuck Yeager fell off a horse. It was October 1947, and he had been out to dinner with his wife Glennis at their favorite spot in the desert—the only place anywhere near Muroc Army Air Field where test pilots like Yeager could truly be themselves: Pancho Barnes’ Fly Inn.

Pancho had spent a decade building an empire in the high desert, first supplying food and services for the nearby base, then slowly building her ranch into a restaurant, night club, hotel, airfield, rodeo venue, and all-around tourist destination. There was even a swimming pool. Pancho would hire models and dancers from LA to come out and work as hostesses. The girls would draw in airmen from the base, but it was Pancho behind the bar or at the beat-up piano or wandering from table to table who provided the spirit of the place. The Fly Inn, later reimagined as the Happy Bottom Riding Club and immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, was everything Pancho was: funky and crass and completely unpredictable.

Muroc (soon to be renamed Edwards Air Force Base) was where the US military tested rockets. The men who piloted those rockets became Pancho’s favorite customers. She had been a test pilot once herself, and her bar became a space where they could blow off steam. “If her little oasis didn’t exist, we test pilots would’ve had to invent something like it,” Yeager wrote in his autobiography. On the night of October 12, 1947, Yeager and Glennis ate at Pancho’s then decided to take a couple of her horses out for a ride in the darkness. Yeager managed to run his horse straight into a closed gate, get kicked, and break a pair of ribs.

The following morning, with Pancho keeping everything quiet, Yeager went to a veterinarian off base to see about his injuries. The vet said not to do anything strenuous. He taped Yeager up. Twenty-four hours later, Yeager broke the sound barrier. Pancho had lived to see aviation go from a sputtering, hand-cranked novelty to a supersonic vision of humanity’s limitless future. The party she threw for Yeager went all night.

During her time in the desert, Pancho cycled through a few more husbands. Her final marriage, in 1952, was to a much younger pilot named Mac McKendry. Yeager walked her down the aisle. The marriage wasn’t meant to last and neither was the Happy Bottom Riding Club. New leadership at Edwards banned airmen from visiting Pancho’s. Then the Air Force claimed it needed her land for a runway extension.

The ensuing legal battle was long and brutal. The Air Force dragged Pancho’s character—claiming (falsely) in court that she had been operating a brothel. Then in late 1953, the Happy Bottom Riding Club suddenly caught fire. Pancho lost her house and her ranch. She spent her remaining years in the desert, living slow. Yeager recalled visiting her in a trailer toward the end of her life. By the end, she was truly broke.

“Well goddamnit,” she told him. “We had more fun in a week than most of the weenies in the world had in a lifetime.”

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY SUPRIYA NAIR
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SOPHIE GREEN
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

In Ghulam, a high-octane Hindi adaptation of On the Waterfront released in 1998, the Eva Marie Saint character—here, a debutante named Alisha—first appears onscreen on a very large motorcycle. In her helmet, leather jacket, and trousers, Alisha is indistinguishable from the rich male thugs she runs with. When the helmet comes off, a river of dark hair, like in a fairytale, falls to frame her perfect young face. The loutish young hero is thunderstruck. So are we. She’s a nice girl; she’s going to be a nice girl; with a face like that, she can’t help but be nice. That moment of introduction, though, is one of thrilling doubt.

In India, as in most parts of the world, this character was for a long time more fantasy than reality. In the crushingly masculine worldview of popular Hindi movies, for instance, the female biker was a descendant of the jodhpurs-wearing equestrienne of an earlier era. She was never nasty. Instead, she was a rich, sheltered virgin, so sublime in her innocence that she thought she could get away with acting like a man. Her eventual conquest was experienced as a supreme satisfaction with order reasserting itself. Soon after we meet her, Alisha puts away childish things. She gives up her black boots and many-zippered jacket to adorn herself in translucent white cotton, rendering herself pure and thin out of both grief for the dead brother and love for the hero.

That was 20 years ago. In 2017, 35 percent of the clientele of the venerable motorcycle company Hero Honda were estimated to be women, the highest figure in the world. The most hardcore of them are the “Bikerni,” a Hinglish term that the country’s first all-female riding club have created for themselves.

“In India there are riders and commuters,” Shabnam Akram, a 53-year-old from Delhi, explains. “Commuters are working-class as a rule and would jump into a car if they could afford it. Riders are a mixed lot. Mostly they are people who actually enjoy riding enough to often forego cars to be able to ride.”

A group of 600-odd women, the Bikerni began with a woman named Urvashi Patole in the western Indian city of Pune before expanding to cities around the country. The riders, whose ages range from the late teens to mid-50s, get in touch from across India—Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Guwahati, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Pune—to plan road trips, attend motorcycling events, and back broadly feminist social causes. Together, they’ve skirted the old silk roads, going as far north as the Nubra Valley in Ladakh and high up near the Himalayan border of India and China. They’ve ridden through lonely, unfriendly districts in the dead of night, and felt goosebumps biking down one of the world’s most magnificent avenues, the Rajpath, or “King’s Way,” which runs from India’s presidential residence to India Gate.

Unlike Alisha, these riders don’t vroom into view as visions of unreal perfection. To passersby whose only familiarity with women on bikes comes from MotoGP and oil company calendars, many of them may seem incongruous, everyday faces with jackets shrugged over utilitarian clothes and traditional jewelry. Their dangly earrings and thin gold chains—in some cases, the necklace that identifies them as married Hindu women—are just as real as the women you see on the street who don’t pass by in a blur. But there are also Bikernis who love their boots and sunglasses—getting “all dolled up with my curls ruling the world,” as 23-year-old Prabhpreet Kaur Bhatti from Delhi puts it— and embrace biker culture. One 35-year-old biker, Anita Krishnan, calls her bike “Mystique” because it’s blue and slinky, like the character from X-Men.

The heroine of Rachel Kushner’s novel The Flamethrowers describes the feeling of driving her bike through American city streets as “pure … it made the city a stage, my stage, while I was simply getting from one place to the next.” The Bikernis, too, are gazed at in this spirit of drama, except their stage isn’t just the city street. It’s all of India, its ice and slush and dust, a hinterland beyond their urban homes too vast be encompassed in any one person’s imagination.

Not every horror story you hear about being a woman in India is true, but sweeping impressions of a culture can be wrong in general and still irritatingly accurate in their particulars. Take the basic question of having a life in public as a woman. In India, the act of simply stepping outdoors becomes exponentially easier if you are seen to have some kind of purpose. For the average Indian woman, all vehicles are imbued with purpose. You get a cycle because it takes you to school. A hand-me-down ungeared scooter takes you to college. You buy your own for the commute to an exhilaratingly powerful first or second job. (You will marry, shortly after, and pool your money to buy your first car).

A motorcycle is something you help a male family member—usually a young, slightly reckless one—buy. In the representative Facebook picture of an Indian family, the father, helmet over reflective sunglasses, possessively clutches the handlebars. The mother, thin, young, probably dressed in a sari for Sunday family visits, perches sidesaddle, precariously, one hand on her mister’s shoulder, the other clutching the back of the seat. The pleats of her clothes are as tightly gathered to her closed knees as the inevitable small child is mashed between her parents’ bodies.

Decorum is a kind of armor worn in public. It’s peculiar to the subcontinent in this specific regard, as a Nigerian friend remarked once in Goa, watching an archetypal family putter past on the street. “We may have some catching up to do,” he said wryly, “but, you know, African women can sit astride the bike.”

“A woman opening her legs on a machine that symbolizes masculinity does not gel well with the culture,” Himani Chandel, who lives in a town in the Himalayan foothills, points out. “It doesn’t just mark you out as rebellious and ‘overempowered.’ It may well be confused with the idea that you are ‘available.’ This is the challenge for women riders in India: maintaining dignity and grace while doing something which symbolizes the opposite.”

Back home, the Bikernis have neighbors, uncles, strangers on the street where they live who think women shouldn’t sit astride the bike. Women riding motorbikes for fun give passersby pause in most parts of the world because women doing anything for fun in public is a rare sight. On the road, these women encounter people amazed at their very existence. “But you’re so short,” the young Delhi biker Prabhpreet Kaur Bhatti is told often. “Do your feet even touch the ground?” When Vaishali Master, a group veteran from Jaipur, lost her way in the hinterlands, she stopped to ask a small shepherd where she was. The child shot back: “First tell me this. Are you a girl or a boy?”

But they are secure in their commitment to riding because they are protected by each other—and because they enjoy it more than anything in the world. In each other’s company, the Indian highway becomes a site of breezy adventure rather than the endless, sun-distorted mirage that someone else has to navigate for you (or worse, a dark, silent middle-of-nowhere on which you have no fellow travelers). Rider after rider said that getting on the bike means freedom from confinement, dependence on men, and social norms. “Biking is a silent shout for me,” one woman, Annapurna Singh, says. Shabnam Akram sums up the dream: “I would like to see a world where women riding motorcycles is no longer special, and comes as naturally as it does to men.”

The Bikernis are proud of their visibility. It reflects on both their fight against restraints at home and those on the women whose homes they pass. Some ride in secret; others, playful, wrestle with husbands and brothers for the keys to the family vehicle. They know they are combatants in a kind of battle. People stare, of course, but in the rearview mirror, through the dust cloud, the Bikernis can see them watching. As Vaishali Master says, they look glorious—“like woman icons and real-life heroines.”

They don’t even have to be angel-faced teen idols to do it. Kushner writes that the combination of women and machines “made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.” That’s elegant bravado; of course women and machines have everything to do with men. Rosie the Riveter isn’t telling women anything they don’t know, after all. She’s telling men, the skeptics, the keepers of the keys, that machines don’t run because they were made from a man’s rib.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY DVORA MEYERS
ART BY THENJIWE NIKI NKOSI
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

What does gymnastics look like without the white gaze? In South African multidisciplinary artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi’s series Gymnasium, we get a glimpse of that world. Her paintings show a sport populated by Black gymnasts in pastel in brightly colored arenas under the gaze of Black judges and watched by throngs of Black spectators.

For most of its history, gymnastics was thought of as a “white sport,” even as a tool of white supremacy. But it’s hard to view gymnastics as an all-white affair anymore. Simone Biles, a Black woman, already considered by most to be the greatest gymnast of all-time. She’s the face of the sport, excelling in a space that wasn’t created with her in mind.

Born in New York to a Greek American mother and a South African father who was in exile, Nkosi moved with her family, first to Zimbabwe when she was 8 and then to Johannesburg in her teens, just as apartheid was ending. She spent her high school years living in a white suburb and contending with the racism of her peers.

Nkosi’s early work depicted that extant racism by painting buildings in the post-apartheid South Africa—well-known structures, signs of white structural power--that may have received a fresh coat of paint but had, more or less, stayed the same. She’s also done a series of portraits called Heroes, in which she painted the people she wanted to see into history. She painted her own relatives but also legendary figures like Jimi Hendrix and Betty Shabbaz, and included several pioneering Black gymnasts in this series—Betty Okino, James Kanati Allen, and Sid Ogelsby.

Gymnasium marries both interests--the focus on lines and space and inserting Black people in those previously white spaces. The work is as much about the clean lines of the gym--the edges of the floor mat, the boundary lines of the floor exercise--as it is about those that inhabit those spaces. The paintings are light, bright, and welcoming, open to all of the young Black gymnasts that grace Nkosi’s canvasses.

“What appealed to me, both then and now, is the tension between control and expression, and the idea of defying the limitations of what we think the body can or cannot do,” Nkosi continued.

Victory Journal: Can you speak about the development of your work over the years?

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi: I had this idea about art needing to have this social justice function. Being brought up by activist parents, there was this sense that I was going to pursue the thing that I wanted to pursue, but I needed to make it work for more people than just myself. I was active in social justice projects my whole life to different extents, but I wanted my art to also work in this way and was often frustrated by what I felt like were the limitations of the field.

In the early 2000s. I was painting buildings in Johannesburg, mostly banks and other either government owned institutions or private institutions that were white owned, and not only white owned, but owned by racist organizations. The Afrikaner Broederbond, which was an Afrikaans business organization or brotherhood; they changed names, but not much else had changed about them. I was using architecture as a way of talking about how the structures remain the same, they look the same. And they were preventing us from moving forward. Money hadn’t really changed hands and the land hadn’t been returned to anybody.

VJ: Gymnastics is an aesthetic sport so you think there would be a significant amount of art about it as there is with dance, but there isn’t all that much out there. Ballet had Degas. Why do you think there hasn’t been that much art with gymnastics as its subject?

TNN: When you’re talking about Degas, you’re talking about Romantic; it’s a completely different era. In the world of contemporary art, I think that artists or at least I was aware of not double portraying the beauty of something. Gymnastics is such a beautiful form. There’s something very easy about just showing people executing moves...It’s almost too easy. I was sort of like, well, what about the everyday? Is there something also remarkable in that?

I went to watch her [South African gymnast Caitlin Rooskrantz] and I couldn’t believe that even in that session with these three top professional gymnasts, like how much they were moving [mats], the labor of it and the teamwork of the practice was really remarkable to me. And the support system; I was quite moved by how much they work together. Because it’s seen as this highly individualized, ritualistic sport. And it’s treated like that by the media. Gymnastics, this is the sport of little girls, and so it’s dismissed on some level as not as serious or worthy of examination.

J: When did you first start painting images from gymnastics and what drew you to the sport as a subject for your work?

TNN: 2012. I was still painting architecture and I was also starting to paint some portraits. In looking at architectural form, I made a video about a tennis court, one of my first [examining] the actual lines and geometry in sport. I was looking for those same lines and I came across this image of a gymnast just having completed their routine, arms up and judges sitting around him. I just thought, this is really beautiful, from a high angle perspective. This sort of marries my two interests.

So I made that painting and then I made another painting a couple of years later, but I hadn’t intellectualized what about it was interesting to me yet. Even in the 2014 painting, 90% of the painting is just an empty gym with apparatus, and then in the mirror, you can just see these kids. They were white kids [in the photograph], and I decided to paint them as Black kids. I just painted myself into the painting. I’ve just done without really even thinking about it, just inserting Black figures into what we think of as a largely white space or a white sport with a white history. Except that now, it’s no longer a white sport. It’s impossible to think about it as a white sport anymore.

VJ: What have you learned about the history and origins of gymnastics?

TNN: I found an article about Niels Bukh, this Danish educationalist and founder of modern gymnastics. He came to South Africa in the 30s. And he was like, you whites need to use this particular sport as a means of demonstrating your dominance...your evolutionary superiority in the face of these natives who will crush you if you keep sitting back. It was introduced to South Africa before apartheid as a tool of white supremacy. And [today] the young people who are dominating the sport are young people of color. I became really interested in that transition over time.

VJ: You’ve spoken about the challenges of living in an all-white suburb of Johannesburg. Do you see any parallels in that experience and that of a young Black gymnast training in a mostly white gym?

TNN: I was 13, turning 14 at the time of the first elections when I started practicing martial arts. The whole time that I practiced, up until I left for college, I was the only woman of color in my class. And my brother was one of the few Black men in the class. On a social level in terms of my family, I was immersed in Blackness, but other than that, in my school, in our neighborhood, and in my kung fu school, I was immersed in a really racist whiteness.

VJ: Your family background made me think about Betty Okino [member of the bronze medal winning 1992 U.S. Olympic gymnastics team] whose family fled from Uganda to the U.S. where she eventually started training with the Karolyis. There’s a story about how Bela and Martha would critique routines to each other in Romanian and the corrections would appear despite the fact that they hadn’t said anything to their English-speaking gymnasts. It turns out Betty, whose mother is Romanian, was translating for her teammates. Betty was living between all these worlds and performing all of these acts of translation. Have you felt that way in terms of your experience, moving between worlds?

TNN: They [the Karolyis] would never have assumed that she, even though they knew her and the background, would understand them because they saw her as so other, which was a similar experience for me in that my mother is Greek and I have family in Greece but they still they won’t assume that I can understand [Greek]. Even now in South Africa, depending on where I am, I’m not exactly seen as Black...whereas in the United States my experience of being Black was more cut and dry because of the one-drop rule. When you asked me about translation and identifying with Betty Okino’s experience like, yes, and the ways in which I identify with that experience depend greatly on where I am and where we are in time.

VJ: In several of the paintings, you have judges who are looking directly at the athlete, and in some paintings you just have the judges alone. What about judges and judging interests you?

TNN: They’re taken from images of real gyms and real competitions, mostly videos, but they are translated into this world I’m creating, which is a psychological sort of space. The judges started to become something more than judges. They became witnesses. Then I was thinking, who are these witnesses? Are they friendly witnesses? Are they objective witnesses or are they subjective witnesses? And then I moved on to thinking about them as ancestors.

I was painting my aunts who all died while we were living in exile and my grandmother and these women that I never met. I started to imagine the judges as these people. What does it mean to have your ancestors witness you? Are they approving, are they disapproving? Are they giving you information, passing on some wisdom to you? Are they supporting you? What do you have to do to please them or to not displease them? Or do you, at some moments, just ignore them and do what you have to do?

VJ: How important is it that all of the judges who are evaluating these Black gymnasts are also Black?

TNN: I go between thinking, is this an ideal world or is this a world that I would just like to see? Maybe it’s a game that I play with myself, like what is a world without any white people? There’s this space that I’m trying to create in my own mind, like what is my Blackness without a white gaze?

VJ: What does it mean for a sport that has been so long associated with whiteness to be dominated by a Black woman?

TNN: I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea that any one group of people is more than any other group. But when you’re made to work, not only twice but like three times or four times or ten times as hard, sometimes extraordinary things emerge. I just feel like she is an incredibly motivating figure—so in touch with her own ability. She makes me think that difficult things are achievable.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY SAM HOCKLEY-SMITH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATIE MCCURDY

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

Calli Gilchrist was seven years old when she started wrestling. Both her uncles wrestled in high school and so did her mom. The way she tells it, though, she probably would’ve ended up doing it even if it wasn’t in the family. “I was a pretty active kid,” she says. “So I think wrestling was an easy route. I was always trying to wrestle my little brother, so it just kind of felt right. It was everything I needed.”

Gilchrist landed on wrestling, which is typically male dominated, even for the under-10 crowd, after trying baseball and soccer. Neither stuck. “I was so physical, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of hand-eye coordination as a kid,” she says. “Showing up, I think I was one of two girls. I walk in and it’s a room full of little boys running around. I remember being very confused, shy, nervous…all those things.”

She stuck with it. The make or break moment came in early middle school, Gilchrist thinks probably the summer between sixth and seventh grade. She went to a wrestling camp at the University of Iowa. “That was a pretty pivotal moment for me, where it was either going to be…Okay, like either I’m all in, or this is something I do in my free time.” Then, when she was in eighth grade, COVID hit. Stuck at home, Gilchrist divided her time between training and schoolwork. The time she was able to dedicate to wrestling clarified her love of it. “I was like, Oh, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I realized that I never wanted to not do this sport anymore.”

The world opened back up. Gilchrist graduated from middle school and kept wrestling as she went into high school. After her sophomore year, she transferred to Choate Rosemary Hall, a coed boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, about an hour from where she grew up. Choate Rosemary Hall wasn’t just any school. It had a boys wrestling program that was over 100 years old, and by 2022, it had a girl’s team, too.

Gilchrist and her friend Sara McLaughlin were the first recruits on the team. In 2025 she was named the first girl’s wrestling prep national champion ever. By 2026, there were 18 girls on the team, and they were dominating all over the country. It was time for Gilchrist to think about college, and how wrestling would factor into her choice. “I knew that I wanted to be part of starting and creating something,” she says. “[Choate Rosemary] was kind of like a test run, and it was a huge success. Being able to do that my junior year was confirmation that I wanted to do it in college.”

Most of the time, when kids go to college, they’re not yet sure what they want to do. But Gilchrist knew that wrestling had to be a core part of her experience. She was accepted at Brown University and decided to attend. The thing was, they didn’t really have an established women’s wrestling team, which meant that, as a recruit, be entering into college with a level of scrutiny on her that the majority of incoming students never have to deal with. It was a big risk, but it paid off.

Gilchrist’s coach, Nick Lattanze, who attended Brown himself and wrestled while there, had a plan to make a great squad: “The first thing I had to do was understand the environment: what resources existed, what the culture was, where the gaps were,” he tells me over email. “Then I had to find the right person to build around—someone who could be a face of the program and put us on the map, beyond being a great wrestler. Someone whose presence would define what this program stands for and make the decision easy for other recruits. That was Calli. Everything else — the recruiting, the fundraising, the platform-building — it all grew from there. It’s about finding the right people at the right time, and not being afraid to ask for help.”

The first time Lattanze saw Gilchrist wrestle, he knew she had something special. “I remember thinking ‘You can’t teach that,’” he says. “That style, that fearlessness, and that desire to compete, that’s not a skill set. That’s a soul set. She attacks the sport the way she approaches life...with joy, with risk, with excitement, and with full commitment. I hope she wins every title there is to win, but that’s almost beside the point. Champions get crowned every year. There’s only ever going to be one Calli Gilchrist. What she represents, how she carries herself, how she competes...that’s going to echo in this program long after any medal.”

This isn’t lost on Gilchrist, who has what she describes as an “innate want to be part of creating something.” “This was way better than anything I could have imagined,” she says of her first year on the team. “I’m not even saying I was trying to keep my hopes low and we surpassed those. I had relatively high hopes and we have surpassed those.” Now she’s in a position where, in addition to defining what it means to be on the Brown women’s wrestling team, she’s building a whole culture. “We have a culture we now get to curate,” she says. “That is one of my favorite things about getting to create a program. It’s up to me. It’s up to coach. It’s up to the girls we bring in next year to create a team culture that hopefully stays with Brown women’s wrestling forever.”

She doesn’t outright say this, but part of the culture Gilchrist has been helping build has been a sort of quiet, calm, confidence. A focusing inward on embracing personal style on the road to becoming a world-class wrestler. Gilchrist tells me about a learning experience she had last year. “I start to get a little bit antsy and I rush things. I really rushed things at club nationals in the finals and it did not work out well for me. I ended up putting myself in so many bad places. I didn’t do what we’d been working on.” But rather than beat herself up, Gilchrist took a step back. Kept her cool. Refocused.

The way she talks about her evolution as a wrestler after that moment is as someone who has learned to trust herself. To not go on autopilot, exactly, but allow her body to work in harmony with her mind to implement the moves she’s been working in her subconscious since she was a small child. “My goal is jut always to get better. I think the best way to look at the sport is that you can’t be perfect at wrestling. I think that’s why I like it so much. You’re never going to hit a move perfectly. If you try to hit it perfectly it’s going to fall apart. You’re not going to be able to do it,” she says.

Now, Gilchrist is focused on refining her wrestling style and continuing to build out the Brown program with Coach Lattanze and the other women wrestlers. Toward the end of our conversation we start talking about what you do once you feel in harmony with your body like this. How do you continue to improve? What do you focus on? “I go for big throws a lot,” she says. “I’m not sure where that came from. I [actually] go for big stuff [often]. I think it keeps things interesting, and I want to be an interesting person to watch.” Then she smiles. “I’m not necessarily a funky wrestler, but I like big moves. I like throwing people way over my head.”

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY AMOS BARSHAD

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BALARAMA HELLER

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

Joseph Wasilewksi lives in a compound in Homestead, Florida, with albino iguanas, tegu lizards, red-footed tortoises, Gila monsters, a crocodile named Wally, and an alligator named RJ. The front of his house is lined with cattle skulls and massive palm fronds in pots and a chain-link fence reading “Caution: This area patrolled by sentry dogs.” He is tall and broad, with orange hair and orange stubble, and looks just perfect in his camo pants and hiking boots. Officially, he’s a conservation biologist. Unofficially, he’s a South Florida legend. JoeWa.

For decades, working alongside universities and preservation unions, Wasilewski has done conservation work locally and internationally. In the mountainous Western Ghats region of India, he’s radio tracked 18-foot king cobras—“The only animal that can kill an elephant besides a man with a gun.” In the Congo he did forest protection work for nearly a decade. “They got guerillas,” he says, “and I mean the ones with them mini-14s.” And when he’s not trotting around trying to save things, he’s putting on a show. The Zoo Miami expo is coming up, and Wasilewski will be overseeing their reptile exhibition. He takes me out back to show me some of the little pals he might display.

We walk under Spanish moss by a massive, snarling T-Rex mannequin, and past cages of bright green iguanas hanging perfectly still. Chickens run around our feet; Wasilewski seems mildly surprised to see them. We get to a massive Galapagos tortoise and Wasilewski happily plucks some green leaves to feed her. She is a lumbering, adorable beast, and her name is Buckshot. “She was the size of a quarter when I got her!” he says to me. Then: “Wow, your face is a mess!” That’s addressed to Buckshot.

We make a pit stop in a trailer full of venomous snakes, sidewinders and rattlesnakes that Wasilewski himself plucked out of mountain ranges in southern Arizona. He spoons one out with a metal rod. It has an elegant black-and-white pattern and the still air of unspoken menace. Seeing me wince, he says, “Oh, you don’t have nothing to worry about.”

“They wouldn’t attack?”

“Hmm? Oh, he’d bite me right now.” It turns out, in fact, that Wasilewski had taken a bad bite just a few years back. It took 48 vials of antivenin to revive him. The necessary antidotes were sourced by his son from snake doctors all over the country. Wasilewski was in the ICU for nine mostly unconscious days.

When he tromps on into a low stone enclosure, I follow behind. Then I see RJ the alligator, and I stop. RJ is hissing, teeth bared. She’s nesting, Wasilewski explains, jabbing toward a mound of leaves and dirt with a wooden pole. She’s done it annually—despite the absence of a mate, and therefore the absence of eggs—ever since he pulled her out of the wild.

Usually she’s more friendly, Wasilewski assures me. He even had her do a commercial for an outdoor furniture company once; she sat on a lounge chair and everything! Now her maternal instincts have her protecting future hatchlings that don’t actually exist. Wasilewski shrugs.

“She’s pissed.”

As a kid on Chicago’s south side, Wasilewski’s only access to reptiles were a few spare library books. He’d read them over and over again. Now he has a goddamn alligator in his backyard. His mother was a housewife. His father was a policeman. “My dad just passed away, ninety-two. He was still waiting for me to get a job. He still thought I just played with snakes.”

II.

I’d gone to Florida intending to spend a few days in Broward County and the Everglades wetlands with a young man named Nick Bishop, aka Nick the Wrangler. Nick has an active YouTube feed, a stated desire for fame, 33,000 Instagram followers, and a knack for finding snapping turtles and redheaded agamas and Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes. Photographer Balarama Heller has been shooting Nick and his cohorts in their nocturnal pursuits for years. Days before I arrived, Nick let us know he was dealing with personal issues that made an interview impossible. But I didn’t have to look far to find other critter-obsessed people to take me to the swamps.

South Florida is the domain of a remarkably varied and passionate band of animal lovers. “Some are biologists or ecologists or herpetologists—“herpers”—specialists in study of reptiles.” Some are amateur reptile maniacs who’ve just figured out how to crack a living in the biz.

I stay at the Galt Villa Inns, a drive-in motel that’d be beachside if it wasn’t stuck on the wrong side of a two-lane thruway. One morning, chugging through free refills of hot coffee in the sun at the bar of the motel pool, I fall into a chat with the bartenders, Willie and Jill. They’re both blond, smiley women in their 50s wearing hotel-uniform teal polos with the certain but distinct energies of Florida lifers. Willie’s tall and cocky and has plastic purple sunglasses and long fingers full of gem-stones. Jill, smaller and peppier, has her hair in braids. Save for a turtle necklace, she is unadorned.

I tell them I’m headed for the Everglades, and they shout at me, “Zigzag!!”

Pardon?

“They can get you with their tail,” Willie says. She means the gators. “You gotta haul ass!” She moves her arm from left to right, exhibiting the exact method in which I have to haul ass. “Zigzag!”

“You know about the death roll?” Jill asks. I do not know about the death roll.

“They don’t like fresh meat,” Willie says, “so they’ll roll you and roll you and roll you and then drown you and then…” She walks away to tend to a customer before providing any more details, but I get it, I think.

III.

“You’re out here and you jump on a big snake,” Tom Rahill tells me as we cruise through the Everglades in a rusty Ford pickup packed full of pillows and Wrangler shirts still on yellow plastic hangers. We’re looking for pythons. “And it works, dude. It’s unreal how well this works!”

Pythons are an invasive species that have chomped down on the Everglades’ natural bobcat, raccoon, and rabbit populations. So the state of Florida licenses contractors to kill them. Rahill’s the only contractor who’s turned his pythoning into charity: His organization, Swamp Apes, brings US armed forces veterans out for catharsis through snake-killing.

Now it’s midnight. We’ve been driving around the levees for hours, and even though we haven’t jumped on any big snakes I’m starting to see the therapeutic appeal. We’ve talked about everything: his wife’s medical problems; his children’s ambitions; his abusive, alcoholic father. “The only happy moments I had when I was a kid was when I was out in the woods,” he tells me.

At 17, his dad kicked him out of their upstate New York home. He landed with relatives in Jacksonville and fell in love with the Everglades. He repeatedly calls them “rugged,” which I come to understand is the highest form of praise in Rahill’s lexicon. He’s been out here in 120 heat index in thick snake-repellent clothes with swarms of mosquitoes big enough to leave a shadow. He’s trudged through the pits of the swamps, happy for every gnarly step.

On the flatbed behind us is a vet named Hunter, a quiet young man in baggy blue jeans and a finely rendered scorpion neck tattoo. With the aid of two potent floodlights, Hunter keeps watch on the critters. I sit in the driver’s seat staring straight ahead, munching Wheat Thins while the road becomes a Lynchian dream-loop of saw-grass, reeds, and nighthawks drawn into our headlights. As we approach the birds flap away, one after another.

Hunter and Tom spot something and hop out of the car with quiet glee. A little basilisk on a reed: a Jesus lizard. A venomous cottonmouth. Then another, even bigger.

Tom: “That’ll kill you.”

Hunter: “Ruin your day, for sure.”

Then Hunter somehow spots an alligator head bobbing out of the water in the dark. We stop and the periscoping eyes stare us down. Next to the eyes is a massive nest of twigs, reeds, and mud. “That’s a momma right there!” Tom shouts, before belting us some Queen: “Moooommaa! Oooohoooooh!!”

Then, for a long while, nothing. We’re waiting for the air to drop, Rahill tells me. We’re waiting for a python to come up out of the darkness. It’s going to happen. I wonder if he has a touch of the obsessive about him. And I know there’s no way I’m going to be the one who suggests packing it in for the night.

By 2:00 a.m. I’m barely mustering the energy to talk, and we haven’t heard from Hunter for hours. But Tom’s a manic force. The sky is black and purple and Rahill’s bandanna-clad, bearded face is mostly obscured in the shadows. He croons a song he wrote about the beauty of North Carolina’s Transylvania County and another about the time he got smacked in the crank by a swinging tree limb while chainsawing. (I think at first crank means groin, but as the song continues I realize it means dick.) Then I hear about how, at the end of his life, before he passed, Tom’s father moved down to Florida. The two reconciled and even became best friends.

It’s late. We’re running out of time, still scanning, still praying for pythons. Finally, Tom says, we’ve got just one last run. “Stoppage time.” We see something—it’s a banded water snake. Tom pops out and picks it up, moving it out of the road. It pees all over him.

We never do get a python, and Tom’s endearingly apologetic about it. I want to tell him I feel like we accomplished something here nonetheless.

“What is my life worth! Nothing!” Tom says at one point, frogs squawking all around us. It’s a reflective mantra of his. A way to ease out of internal, churning anxiety. “The universe doesn’t care about me!” Grinning, I heartily agree that it doesn’t care about me either.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY JAIME LOWE

ART BY INJI SEO

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

The river is crowded, claustrophobic, wall-to-wall with rotting flesh. In the beginning, the bodies are strong, moving fast against rapids and walls of water. By the end, those same bodies, exhausted from the effort, just barely keep course. The fetid smell is persistent, overwhelming, something out of nightmares. Death and slipping scales, gelid skin, the end of everything that was, salt, minerals, and protein dripping away with every attempt to work past the current; the salmon, the gang of salmon, the mass migration of salmon, keeps on pushing, swimming dead-eyes-first into waterfalls and whitewater currents, flopping through gravel, shimmying through shallow graves.

They are always moving toward the place once known, back beyond the breach of salt water to the freshwater tributaries of their protected youth. Not home, not at sea; not living, not dead; not schooled, not alone; not still. Just motion, just forward trajectory. The salmon—hooked jaws screaming, rainbow skin that will turn ashen with time—follow an instinctual pull. And for what? The one-in-a-million chance that their eggs are fertilized, kept safe, survive, and that their offspring eventually spawn another generation of wildness.

I. Children of the grave

The eggs are cream-colored with a hint of orange. They are lopsided and spherical, each pinpointed with a black dot—an eye watching, waiting to burst through. The eggs sit in a cool, calm freshwater stream, a tributary lined with bones and bleached decay, the remains of their mothers and fathers. The river is an offshoot of the Columbia that dead-ends near a dirt road. It’s lined with new scruff and fallen logs—twigs, wood, and leaves that provide shade and hiding places for a nest. Shadows lurking under shadows.

Next to the lifeless bodies of the previous generation, the baby salmon emerge, still attached to the yoke that they will eat for up to a month. They are translucent before growing into trembling iridescence. After spending their first month among cool corners and safe nooks, the baby salmon—called fry—venture farther from the nest, where they eat the soft bodies of the previous generation—what’s left of their ancestors.

As juveniles, they stall for a year where rivers meet an endless horizon of salty Pacific. Here they mutate, becoming salmon that can live at sea. In the estuary their gills and kidneys begin to change so that they can process salt water. They are anadromous, living in both fresh-water and salt water. They go through smoltification, physiological and morphological changes; they shift kin, donning the dark back, light belly, and silvery coloration that allows open water fish to blend in. They become fish that seek out deeper water and avoid light. They remain in brackish waters and tidal creeks until this transformation is complete and they enter the ocean.

II. Into the void

Pacific salmon—sockeye, coho, chinook, chum and pink—are fleshy, hot red, and spotted like cheetahs, sometimes fierce with menacing underbites. Salmon live at sea, thousands of miles offshore, for three years or so. They are sometimes alone and sometimes together, schooling to fool their predator, lining up to flash big silvery skin that tricks whales, dolphins, and galloping orcas into not swallowing them whole. If salmon had only natural predators, their continuing life cycle would still be phenomenal. A single female salmon can carry thousands of eggs, but very few of those eggs survive to maturity. Female salmon can lay up to 10,000 eggs; then between zero and 10 live to be adult salmon and spawn again.

After years at sea, sucking down herring, pelagic amphipods, and krill, salmon are overcome by an instinctual pull to return to the freshwater rivers of their birth. They know, rooted in their bellies, to return. They are fat and ready. They have absorbed as many vitamins, as much strength, as much life as possible from the ocean; they return to the gravel beds of their youth to extend their species through future generations. No one knows why they return to that specific place. They spawn to die, they spawn to live.

III. Eyes of a stranger

They reorient and remember the cool, calm place they came from and make their way back, smelling the sensational path they left as juveniles, pulled back to the exact freshwater place they knew as youths. A salmon can detect one drop of water from its home stream in 250 gallons of seawater. They find the mouth of their particular tributary, the place that served as a bridge between adolescence and adulthood. Scientists believe salmon use a combination of magnetic orientation, celestial orientation, the memory of their home stream’s smell, and a circadian calendar to return to that natal stream.

When adult salmon reenter freshwater, their bodies transmogrify. An adult female’s belly grows; an adult male may develop a hooked snout, humped back, and elongated teeth, all used to attract a mate and defend spawning territory. All salmon stop feeding when they reenter freshwater; their stomachs disintegrate to make more room for sperm and eggs. They starve themselves like a wrestler making weight, surviving entirely on the nutrients they’ve stored from their years at sea. White Salmon River, two hours east of Portland, Oregon, is named after the salmon that arrive pale from vitamin depletion. Their flesh begins to rot, chunks falling off along the way.

IV. Caught in a mosh

A throng of hook-nosed red bodies crowd together, pushing above water, forward, thrashing, leaping through the air, throttling themselves up, climbing waterfalls—a natural anomaly. They migrate hard against the current. Topping the waters from below, fish bodies push violently through the surface, moving forward against the velocity of a downstream pull.

But the rush of bodies barely happens anymore. Humans have made spawning scarce and unpredictable. After decades of species decimation in the dammed Northwest river system, salmon and other native freshwater fish will face extinction within the next century. Their migration can extend 900 miles inland and 6,000 miles in elevation, all the way into the mountains of Idaho, carrying essential nutrients—phosphorous, nitrogen, calcium—everywhere they go and everywhere they die. They are a staple source of protein and vitamins for other species on the brink of extinction, like grizzly bears and orcas. The 79 remaining Southern Resident killer whales in the Salish Sea are listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. A limited food supply has been identified as one of the primary reasons for their decline—chinook salmon make up more than 80 percent of orcas’ preferred diet. If salmon die off, others will follow in their wake.

V. Slaves beyond death

Male salmon arrive in spawning grounds first to stake out territory. Some swim 200 yards, others 2,000 miles. They snap at each other, biting and braying, and show off their elongated snouts. A female salmon who makes it all the way upstream to the place of her birth will dig several depressions, a network of nests called a redd. She flips her tail, fast and hard, kicking up gravel and dust. She may lay between 2,000 to 5,000 eggs before she is spawned out. A male fish will then fertilize those eggs, sometimes battling for the privilege. Sometimes the eggs will be fertilized by more than one male fish. A haze of white smoke like a fog machine coats the pile of tiny orange spheres. The adult salmon stand watch over the eggs, dying, rotting, decomposing, over their hypothetical future—death that provided life and continues to.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY BUD SCHMELING

IMAGES COURTESY OF THE LEROY NEIMAN FOUNDATION

There is a group photo taken in 1985 at a New York restaurant called Mr. Chow’s, a shot arranged by Eric Goode, then the owner of the legendary downtown club, Area. It features pretty much every NYC art-scene heavy hitter working at the time: Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente. And there in the back row, raising a champagne glass, is LeRoy Neiman. According to the musician John Lurie (also featured in the photo), Neiman “had no idea what he was doing there.” The mustachioed bon vivant was almost as famous as Warhol, but had none of the art-world credibility. Yet there he was, among the downtown weirdos of the ’80s avant-garde. LeRoy Neiman was everywhere.

Mainstream America knows Neiman for his splashy and colorful oil paintings of famous athletes, all captured in his loose, kinetic style. He contributed to general-interest publications like Time and Playboy, as well as commercial outlets like Burger King and Wheaties. The world’s first, and maybe last, official sports illustrator, Neiman was present at virtually every major sporting event during the latter part of the 20th century, feverishly sketching away at Super Bowls, Kentucky Derbys, Olympics, World Cups, World Series, Grand Prix races, Wimbledons, and countless other championship games and title bouts. (It’s hard to imagine today, but Neiman was shown on live TV, painting watercolors during the Olympic Games throughout the ’70s and ’80s.) His work appeared on tickets, programs, commemorative posters, and adorns the walls of the baseball, football, and boxing halls of fame. As Don King memorably said, “LeRoy could do more with a paintbrush than a monkey could do with a peanut.”

Could critics and rivals have been jealous of his financial and commercial success? Were the affectations of the cloak-wearing, stogie-smoking dandy too indigestible? Or maybe it was that the rich and famous people who Neiman was drawn to as subjects were never explored as anything beyond rich and famous. Whatever might have motivated the opprobrium, Neiman was never bothered by the fine-art world’s cold shoulder. “Early on I’d found myself on the wrong side of the art scene, but, being born on the wrong side of tracks, that was just fine with me,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir, All Told. “...I’d rather be a folk hero to 40 million Playboy readers, any day, than an icon among the airless art elite.”

From a very early age, Neiman (born Runquist, adopting the surname of his stepfather after his dad abandoned the family when LeRoy was a small boy) recognized and cultivated his talent, intoxicated with the effect it had on people and the opportunities it brought him. After serving in WWII, Neiman received his education through the GI Bill, attending, and then teaching at, the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. Around that time he began to develop his signature style—he happened upon a bounty of discarded house paint, and discovered that through rapid application, the overflowing paint "simulates movement." He soon had the ridiculously good fortune to meet an ambitious copywriter—by the name of Hugh Hefner—who was about to launch one of the most culturally influential publications of the century. And when in 1954, Hefner decided that Playboy's jokes page needed some visual assistance, Neiman came up with the Femlin, an ink sketching of a seductive siren in thigh-high stockings who would appear in every issue for the next 50 years. A few years later came the recurring column "Man at His Leisure," with Neiman playing the part of globetrotting gadfly, sending back illustrated dispatches from the nude beaches, casinos, and discotheques of swinging-’60s Europe. In All Told, Neiman reflected, "My whole career has basically been built on taking man-at-his-leisure seriously!"

Bouncing around the world on Hef's dime is how Neiman transformed into a Zelig-like character, and his impressive Rolodex wasn’t even limited to the best and the brightest of the sporting world. Because of his George Plimpton–esque presence at the crossroads of sports, politics, arts, and popular culture, over the years Neiman sketched portraits of such disparate figures as Joe Namath, Roman Polanski, and Fidel Castro, while befriending icons like Sinatra, JFK, and Ali. But it was in 1960, when he covered the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, that sports became his true calling. Amidst the high-profile, televised assignments, there he was as the team artist for the New York Jets, always situated on the sidelines, his pen moving furiously. (Neiman was so popular that during one particularly frustrating game in 1975, the fans at Shea Stadium began chanting, "Put LeRoy in!") His never-less-than heroic depictions helped transform athletes into celebrities. "To point out how the strong man stumbled, or how an athlete might have succeeded, but didn't, is outside my appetite," he wrote in his monograph, Winners: My Thirty Years in Sports.

Neiman managed to capture split-seconds in sports with an impressionistic yet informed perspective. In his sketches from the field he utilized a solid line and a reserved tonal palette; unlike television or photography, these drawings freeze a fleeting moment of action in a free-floating space without ascribing an overt meaning. Neiman found the stillness in both massive and mundane athletic movements, insightfully casting a single rapid motion as an instant bit of magic. Just note the study of ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich from his LSU days, where within one page Neiman’s quick doodles of dribbles and free throws lead to the more fully formed, filled-in images of Maravich pulling up his gym socks (one of the player’s signature tics). Or consider Neiman’s depiction of Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer’s 1972 World Chess Championship showdown in Reykjavik (the artist was allowed to remain in the room long after Fischer had kicked all the cameramen out). The drawing’s construction is spare and geometric, except for the two gray figures locked in their contemplative standoff. It’s a Cold War moment if ever there was one.

Neiman’s work was never overtly political by any means, but he was there, visually recording an era of extraordinary change. A confidant of Ali’s, he followed the Champ’s career from the earliest Cassius Clay days to his final punches. Neiman, an unabashed fan of the sport, was granted inside access to the most intimate pre- and post-fight moments. In one of his most affecting sketches, from 1964, Ali is shown deep in conversation with Malcolm X and a Black Muslim advisor, the scene rendered with Neiman’s quick skill, fluidity, and unflinching devotion.

"Something was ready to explode—I could feel it," Neiman recalls of that meeting, yet another instance of his being at the right place at the right time, always ready to pick up the pen and sketch on whatever canvas was available. Like Ali, his staying power was off the charts. "Ali’s greatest achievement, in my mind, wasn't that he won the crown three times," Neiman said, in a statement that could apply just as equally to himself, "but that he did the same act for 20 years and never bored us."

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WORDS BY ANICEE GADDIS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GUSTAVO DI

Riding the line between brutal exorcism and a poetic sublime, boxing has produced more legends than any other sport of the last century. The noble art, as it’s historically known, has also fed an enduring fascination with pugilism as being more than just a sum of its parts. A solo act, an intimate engagement, one of the purest demonstrations of man-versus-man, boxing is ultimately a complex dance whose multiple rhythms coalesce into a strange tango falling somewhere between the lethal and the divine.

In Ghana, boxing ranks second only to football in terms of national obsessions. In the small oceanside fishing town of Bukom, an open-air boxing ring is situated within close reach of the local football pitch. Having already produced a wealth of hometown champions, Bukom has taken on the otherworldly dimensions of a mythological kingdom whose elegant warriors live, breathe and dream boxing. As the story goes, when a victor returns home after a win, the short twenty-minute journey from the capital of Accra can take as long as two hours once the locals turn out to escort their hero home. This is fight town. This is Bukom. This is myth becoming legend.

“The boxing university” has seen its fighters, most notably Azumah Nelson, gain celebrity status beyond Ghana’s borders and even induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Bukom’s hierarchy of top contenders includes Alfred Kotey, Ike Quartey, Kwame Asante and Joshua Clottey, who won the International Boxing Federation title by defeating Zab Judah in 2008. One who aspires to join their illustrious ranks is Malik “Bukom Snake” Jabir.

When I met Jabir in the spring of 2008, his record was 11-6 and he was somewhere on an uncertain road toward becoming either a boxing champion or a journeyman opponent. He invited me to come and watch a training session at Bukom’s acclaimed Attah Quarshie Boxing Gym. Upon arrival, I noticed boxing posters in German, Swedish and Russian papering the upper reaches of concrete walls, while hand-painted slogans decorated the remaining sepia-toned space. “Rule #1: The trainer is never wrong. Rule #2: If you think the trainer is wrong, refer to Rule #1.” The trainer himself informed me that the gym, operational since 2000, serves as a second home for some forty boxers from the neighborhood and beyond. The current crop of talent, alongside Quartey and Kotey, includes the towering 30-year-old heavyweight Frank “Big Shark” Frimpong, along with Joseph Agoko and George Hash, who, at 22, is the youngest ranked boxer from Bukom. Despite his current record, the trainer assured me that Malik Jabir could still turn out to be Bukom’s next thing.

As I sat on a bench waiting for Jabir to show up, a row of children lining the windowsill cocked their heads with expressions of transfixed envy bordering on uncertain alarm. The cement doors, stretched canvas boxing ring and chained punching bags were peopled by five young men who looked like muscular furniture arranged at wry angles in the mid-morning light. Frimpong, a gravity-defying Goliath, began taking shots at a corner bag. Between the smacks of glove against canvas, you could hear him talking to the bag, scheduling his right jab with a click of the tongue, alternately rallying and admonishing an imaginary opponent. At 6’6”, he towered over his more compactly framed colleagues shadowboxing on the sidelines. The other boxers’ chat—their Shh Shh Shhs to his Ahh Ahh Ahhs—the pounding of fists and the ether of sweat and breathing formed a cadenced backdrop for individual soliloquies. After awhile it seemed as though the men were breathing and boxing collectively, like a well-oiled machine at ease with its various parts.

A stir among the children announced Jabir’s arrival. After a brief round of greetings, he summoned me to an abandoned courtyard, enclosed by crumbling facades that looked closer to belonging in Old Havana than contemporary Accra. There was a high metallic sun and the sky was a faded, powdery blue. After half an hour of sprints, Jabir began shadowboxing, pausing only to remove his T-shirt and accept refreshment from a young boy who fed him water like milk from a bottle. Another boy with a plaster cast fitted on his left foot muttered to himself as he measured and dissected the lightweight’s unusually asymmetrical technique. Jabir, whose thuggish pout transformed to a darkening grimace, was lost in the moment. By the time he took a break, a local posse of wannabees, has-beens and future aspirants had amassed to watch.

“I train Monday to Monday ... twenty-four-eight,” Jabir offered as we sat talking under the now blazing sun. He started training professionally in 1999, at the age of 16, but was discovered as early as age 7 by a coach who spotted him mashing up some kids in the street one day. “He walked me home and asked my mother if he could coach me,” Jabir recalled. “I was always fighting in the street so my parents were happy when they saw that I could develop my hobby into a real skill. I don’t have my own family yet, but once I do, my children will not follow me into the ring.”

At 5’8” and weighing “9 stones,” the topography of Jabir’s body alone—the carved biceps and ripped abdominal cords—is proof positive of his dedication to his craft. He works out from 4:00 to 7:00 every morning, takes tea with an egg for breakfast and spends the remainder of the day training at the gym. He lives alone, sleeps alone and often cooks his own evening meal of rice and stew. His mantra is not unlike that of any other professional athlete: “I eat. I sleep. I don’t do things that will weaken me.” He’s never been injured, is not yet married and abstains, for the most part, from the “weakening” vices of sex, drugs and cigarettes. His sole indulgences it would seem are watching football matches, listening to music, particularly to Ga artists (the Ga-Adangbe are an ethnic group from Ghana), and dancing. “Every Friday night I go out to the Yegola club with my boys,” he confessed with an airy smile, “but by Saturday morning, I’m back in the ring.”

I thought I wouldn’t see Jabir again after our day spent at the gym. But as it turned out, we bumped into each other at a Ghana-Nigeria football match at the Accra Sports Stadium a few nights later. After linking arms in the post-victory tumult, we made our exit among the fans, many of whom paused amidst the frenzy to pay respect to Jabir. In the quieter reaches of a neighboring lawn, we watched the crowd celebrating the Black Stars victory. There was something delicate and breakable about the “Bukom Snake” with a God complex that night. Even so you could still smell the fighter in him. You could tell by the look in his eyes that boxing, whether forecast or freely chosen, was his natural birthright.

Since that day I’ve followed Jabir’s progress from afar. That fall he fought for a title bout in Moscow and was knocked out in the seventh round. He was inactive for almost a year and a half afterwards, but scored a first-round knockout in his comeback match. Jabir has won three more fights in the past year, including the West African Union lightweight title. It may not be the most coveted belt in the world, but I hope and imagine that it earned him a long trip home from Accra and a proper hero’s welcome in Bukom.

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WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSEPH SWIDE

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

On a gray, oppressively muggy Saturday afternoon in a far corner of FDR Park in South Philadelphia, fourteen teenagers from the Allen V.R. Stanley School, a boarding school in Kampala, Uganda, stand in the right field grass of a pristine baseball field. A coach in the infield hits a mix of fly balls and bouncing line drives for each player to field in quick succession. Behind a chain link fence along the right field line that separates the field from the elevated Delaware Expressway, a scout for another Major League team, dressed like an undercover cop in baseball turf shoes, records the drills on his iPhone.

Various photographers and an independent filmmaker document the moment, and a small Phillies TV crew waits to conduct interviews after the drills conclude. The occasion is the first ever visit to America by a Ugandan high school baseball team comprised mostly of 15-16 year olds, a team that essentially doubles as the Ugandan national baseball team. They’re also very possibly the best baseball team in Africa.

This afternoon, they’re taking on one of the Phillies U16 RBI Baseball teams. Uganda puts up six runs in the top of the first, batting all the way through their lineup and back again. After quickly retiring the Phillies’ side in the bottom half, they add two more runs in the top of the second. The game has clearly become a rout.

Pitcher Joshua Muwanguzi enters at the bottom of the second. He’s a baby-faced fourteen-year-old who can’t be much taller than 5’5”. Muwanguzi is both the smallest and youngest player on the Ugandan roster. He spends most of the games sitting quietly in the corner of the dugout, carefully managing the scorebook. He works his inning at the mound efficiently, relying more on guile than velocity, and returns to the dugout with another scoreless frame on the scoreboard. As he reclaims his seat and scorebook, his analysis is cold and plain.

“I think those guys are just scared,” says Muwanguzi. “Just because of the confidence we have. I think they heard about us.”

Uganda would go on to win by a score of 16-2.

Ugandan baseball is the brainchild of Richard Stanley, a former Proctor & Gamble executive in New Jersey and co-owner of the minor league Trenton Thunder. In 2002, Stanley was in Uganda on a USAID trip when a government official approached him about developing organized programs for baseball. He decided to focus on building Little League programs to develop young players,.using his connections to garner funding and equipment. In 2012, a Little League team from the central Ugandan city of Lugazi won the Europe-Africa regional qualifier tournament and became the first Ugandan team to compete at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

The following year, Stanley opened the Allen V. R. Stanley School in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. Drawing a student body from around the country, the school operates as a free boarding school with rigorous academics as well as athletics. It places a particular emphasis on baseball and softball. In 2015, the AVRS School’s Little League team became Uganda’s second team to reach the Little League World Series. In their first game in Williamsport, they gained a new level respect in defeating the Dominican Republic by a score of 4-1.

A talented Dominican 12-year-old typically does not play in Little League programs nor aspire to reach Williamsport. His focus is instead on being a top player when he turns sixteen, the minimum signing age for the MLB. As the first class of students at the AVRS school now moves beyond Little League age and into high school, Stanley has begun to shift away from Little League and towards the Dominican model, with the ambitious goal of providing young Ugandan players a springboard to the a professional career.

Twenty four-year-old Tony Opio is the assistant coach for the AVRS team on their trip through America. Quiet but astute, he spends most of the games sitting on a bucket at the end of the dugout, barking out pointed instruction in Luganda, a Bantu language known by everyone on the team. Opio comes from a region in Uganda’s north that was a center of fighting between the Ugandan government and Joseph Kony’s resistance movement before his forces were pushed into the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Opio first encountered baseball through a Japanese ex-pat at a university when he was about 13 years old, in the nascent stages of Stanley’s programs in the country.

“I started being a DH,” says Opio. “I didn’t know how to use a glove.”

When he finally began playing the field, he was put at pitcher after his fastball was clocked at 86 miles per hour. After learning to play infield as well, he received an opportunity to go to Japan for six months to train through a program affiliated with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants. He was still only fifteen years old when he came back to Uganda and was soon given another opportunity, this time by the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks to play with their U18 team. If Opio showed improvement over the next couple of years, he could come back to Japan again and play on the Hawks’ senior team. But due to what Opio describes as a misunderstanding between Opio and Barnabas Mwesiga, the president of Ugandan baseball at the time, it never happened.

“Every time they send him an invitation for me to go and play,” says Opio. “He doesn’t want to show me.”

Opio next traveled to South Africa to train with a program run by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Over the course of four separate trips there, Opio would meet Gift Ngoepe, whose debut with the Pirates this past April made him the first African-born player in Major League history. Opio remembers frequently being pitted head-to-head with Ngoepe’s younger brother Victor, who is currently playing with the Pirates’ Gulf Coast League team.

But again, Mwesiga eventually halted Opio’s trips to South Africa and like many of his former teammates, he gave up on pursuing a playing career.

“We had a bunch of good players, really really good players. People used to throw 90,” says Opio. “But they didn’t get that opportunity … That’s what I can say about these kids,” he adds. “They just need an opportunity.”

Those opportunities are starting to open up for baseball players in Uganda. Last year, two scouts from the Cincinnati Reds became the first ever Major League scouts to visit the country when they came to the AVRS school to evaluate high school age players. They took an interest in Lawrence Zingi, an infielder and pitcher whose fastball has been clocked in the high 80s.

While Major League teams may have the budgets and resources to send scouts all the way to Uganda, Stanley organized this trip to the United States to help open up the smaller and more attainable opportunities, like those at small American colleges that could get players to places outside of Uganda while also helping sustain interest in the program.

“Getting a couple scholarships for these kids will go a long way in developing the athletes in Uganda today and into the future,” said Stanley, via email before the team’s arrival in the United States. “By forcing the government into support [sic] athletics in the secondary schools and eventually the primary schools.”

In the two weeks they spent in the United States, the kids from the AVRS School played nearly every day. They began in Cincinnati at the RBI Baseball World Series, at which they finished with a dominant 6-0 record. They then spent a week with host families in Tom’s River, New Jersey, playing games with wood bats against top high school-aged club teams from around the Tri-State area. In the last competitive game of their stay in Toms River, the AVRS school played against the top team of the Staten Island Orioles, an elite organization of travel teams that boasts over 120 alumni who have gone on to play collegiate baseball.

AVRS got off to a sluggish start. They had spent the day at the beach, their first experience of any ocean. But they rallied behind aggressive base running, strong pitching from Zingi and others, and a towering grand slam from star catcher Denis Achidri that gave the AVRS team a late lead. Staten Island eventually pulled out a narrow victory in the 10th inning—only the second loss in the two weeks for the AVRS team.

After the game, Stanley gathered the dejected Ugandan team in the dugout to try to put the game in context.

“Is it a funeral?” He asked, lightening the mood. “You’re here to learn. You’re learning about the Atlantic Ocean. You’re learning about America. You’re learning about how good you are.”

The world is also learning about how good Uganda is. And the next goal on the horizon for Ugandan baseball is to send a team built around these players from the AVRS School to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. A lot of work remains to attain Olympic qualification but for a group of Ugandan teenagers who have now competed in the Little League World Series, the RBI Baseball World Series, excelled at every level and are now grabbing the attention of Major League scouts, the Olympic Games in many ways just feels like the next logical step.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY TIM STRUBY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY HARRIS MIZRAHI

Every July, men and women come to a small town in the Chequamegon National Forest toting their handsaws, axes, chainsaws, and climbing spurs. They haven’t come in hopes of logging the plentiful white pine; they’re here in search of glory at the lumberjack world championships. What began in 1960 as a way to acknowledge the rich history of the logging industry has become an annual event that attracts tens of thousands. Over three days, 100 “Jack and Jills” compete in 21 events such as logrolling, axe throwing, the 90-foot climb, and hot saw.

The LWC is about family, and traditions passed down through the years. Names like Hoeschler, Duffy, Scheer, Cogar. Competitors like Jason Lentz, who hails from Diana, West Virginia, can trace his lumberjacking lineage through 11 generations. His father, Mel, and grandfather Mervin are both past champions, many times over.

Timbersports were born of the workplace. Legend has it that the first competition took place in Tasmania in 1870, as a bet between two loggers as to who could fastest fell a tree. In the US, lumberjack events date to the 1880s, yet it wasn’t until 1910 that loggers held organized competitions for the public.

Logrolling is a test of balance, coordination, agility, and strategy. Experience also helps. Many of the best rollers were atop a log before they could ride a bike. Specially caulked birling shoes help competitors spin, stop, and start on a length of Western red cedar. Last one standing wins. Never take your eyes off your opponent’s feet.

Some female competitors— referred to as Lumberjills— are members of Axe Women, an all-women timbersports group. Founded six years ago, they chop, cut, and saw their way through competitions and exhibitions around the country.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY DAVID HILL

ART BY BEN MARRA

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

It was a balmy, rainy September night in San Pedro, Costa Rica in 2018 when 43-year-old William Sean Crieighton left his office and headed home for the night. On his way, he was pulled over by two police officers near San Francisco of San Isidro in Heredia.

The police knew Creighton. At least, they knew him as “Tony,” the name everybody in Costa Rica knew him by. Creighton, the owner of the enormous online sportsbook 5dimes, was one of the most powerful and wealthy people in Costa Rica. His business, while legal in Costa Rica, was against the law in the United States, where Creighton was a citizen. So he had spent much of his adult life in Costa Rica, marrying a local and fathering two children along the way. He had also grown rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Creighton wasn’t pulled over because he was speeding or breaking any other law. The cops had been waiting for him. They were dirty. And they were after his money. A grey pickup truck soon pulled up alongside of Creighton’s Porsche Cayenne. Four men got out and forced Creighton into the truck. One of the kidnappers took off in the Porsche in one direction, and the truck took off in another.

Creighton had always kept a low profile in Costa Rica. Despite his fabulous wealth, he dressed casually, t-shirts and sandals were a standard uniform. He drove himself. He rarely used security guards. He took great pains to not be photographed. He kept his name off of his company’s records. And he never let anyone in Costa Rica know his real name. His colleagues and customers only knew him as “Tony.” And for nearly two decades this had served him well, kept him under the radar and safe from both the law and the outlaws alike. On this night, however, a coalition of both had caught up to him. “5dimes Tony” had been kidnapped.

II

Creighton was part of a generation of sports bettors who came up in the early days of the internet, when American bookies were taking their operations offshore to avoid prosecution. By 1998, there were several dozen sports betting websites operating from places like Curacao, Malta, and Costa Rica. Players like Creighton would scour the various betting lines on offer across this bevy of sportsbooks and look for discrepancies in the odds between different sites. Creighton created his own models for handicapping games using Microsoft Excel and could find lines he believed were wrong. And he took advantage of a marketing spree by online sportsbooks to attract new customers by offering them bonus money for opening new accounts. “Tony would deposit $10,000 in a sportsbook and in three weeks the account would be over six figures,” says one of Creighton’s colleagues from that era. “He devastated bookies.”

One of the early pioneers in the offshore, online sports betting market was an American bookmaker named Al Ross. Ross ran a number of online sportsbooks and casinos including a group of sites under the banner of sportsbook.com. Creighton was winning a fortune from Ross’s sites. In 1998, Ross was one of 21 offshore sportsbook operators to be charged by the US government in the first-ever federal prosecution for online gambling. Because his legal fees were mounting, Ross decided to cut his losses with Creighton. He offered Creighton his own sportsbook as payment. Creighton accepted the offer, and by 1999 he was in Costa Rica setting up shop with two of his childhood friends and five other Americans he had hired. Creighton’s sportsbook was named “5dimes,” gambler-speak for $5,000. The name itself was a message to the world of gamblers that Creighton was willing to book big action. Creighton had plenty of experience beating sportsbooks, so he had some inkling of how to avoid getting beat when he was on the other side of the counter.

“Tony was always a gambler first,” says Mark Howard, one of those first employees who helped Creighton start 5dimes. “He’d take any bet, and if it was too big, he’d either lay off or play the action.” What this meant was that when Creighton accepted a wager that was larger than he wanted to have to pay off if he lost, he’d have a decision to make.He could either bet the other side with another bookie, thereby “laying off” most of his exposure, or he could make the same bet with another bookie for even more money, and then root for his customer to win the bet. Where a lot of bookies were content to try to balance action on a game and live off the “vig,” the baked-in advantage the house had when the same amount of bets were made on both sides of a game, Creighton was always gambling. Even as a bookmaker he was still leveraging his money, looking for edges and weaknesses in the market. Because of this, he wasn’t afraid to take larger bets from professional players. “We’d take action from Billy Walters,” said Howard, referring to the notorious American sports gambler, who was so good at gambling most Las Vegas sportsbooks refused to book his action. Creighton, however, wanted to know what Billy Walters was betting. That was information he could use. Creighton could copy Walters bets at other bookmakers. Because he ran his own sportsbook, Creighton rarely had any trouble getting his own bets down. “They all took Tony’s bets,” says Howard. “And all of them got their asses handed to them.”

Within a couple of years, Creighton had put a number of other offshore bookmakers out of business, including all of the other sportsbooks that rented office space in the same building as 5dimes headquarters in San Pedro. 5dimes would absorb many of the shuttered shops, and Creighton steadily grew his empire. By 2003, according to Howard, 5dimes was taking in a million dollars a day.

III

When Creighton was finally removed from the truck, he found himself in a strange place. It wasn’t a dank and dark basement with a swinging lightbulb. It was the modest and well-appointed home of an old woman in La Trinidad de Morovia, about 6 miles from where he had been pulled over by police and abducted. His Porsche was driven to another location in Heredia, far from where he was taken, and crashed into a barrier to make it look like there had been an accident.

At around 3AM, Creighton’s wife, Laura Varela Fallas, received a phone call from someone she didn’t know. The caller told her they had her husband and demanded $5,000,000 in ransom. She was going to need time to figure out how to get the money. It was late. And how would she even know they were telling the truth? The caller put Creighton on the line with her so she would know they had him and that Creighton was still alive. And they let her know they weren’t going to wait until morning for her to get the money. How, she wondered, would she get five million dollars to them before morning? Simple, the caller answered. Bitcoin.

Unable to secure the full five million, she agreed to send nearly one million in bitcoin immediately. After a series of clicks, it was done, and the kidnapper had the money in his bitcoin wallet. He and his conspirators began to pack.

When morning broke across Costa Rica a few hours later, Varela Fallas had already hired two private security consultants, both former FBI agents from the United States, to help her locate Creighton. At 9:00am she contacted the Costa Rican Judiciary Investigative Police (OIJ), but it was clear that she wasn’t willing to put her faith in the local authorities alone. The Americans and the OIJ each conducted their own separate investigations, racing to see who could find Creighton first.

The Americans suspected they were up against some dark forces. They reached out to a connection in the Costa Rican underworld and arranged to purchase illegal firearms to protect themselves. Then, once they were sufficiently armed, they set out looking for Creighton. The Americans struck gold first, locating Creighton’s crashed Porsche. They immediately suspected the crash was staged. They went to the OIJ to let them know about their suspicions. The OIJ weren’t grateful or looking to cooperate. They kicked the Americans off of the investigation after learning about their illicit gun purchases.

For their part, the OIJ were able to trace the bitcoin transaction to three separate bitcoin wallets and discovered they belonged to a 25-year-old computer engineer named Jorduan Morales Vega. Despite being a computer engineer, Morales Vega must have misunderstood how cryptocurrency worked and assumed it was anonymous. According to the OIJ, the bitcoin wallet the ransom was transferred to was opened from Morales Vega’s residence in Cartago. By viewing the blockchain, they were able to eventually ascertain Morales Vega’s name and address. But it wouldn’t matter. By the time the OIJ had Morales Vega’s name, he was already gone, having crossed the Panamanian border on his way to Cuba. Morales Vega, as well as “5dimes Tony,” had disappeared.

IV

If Morales Vega needed some pointers on how to disguise his identity and launder the ransom, he would have only needed to have asked his captive. Creighton had lived the better part of the last two decades as a ghost. Unlike a lot of American bookies who had expatriated to Costa Rica who were afraid of returning, Creighton freely traveled between the United States and Central America. According to Howard, Creighton often ran 5dimes from West Virginia, communicating with his staff through instant messenger, never over the phone. Even his employees knew him only as “Tony.” He tried to keep his name off of 5dimes official documents, and installed various Costa Rican citizens as titular officers and executives to disguise his ownership.

Creighton had good reason to take such caution. He had seen Al Ross and a host of other Carribean sportsbook tycoons get ensnared in prosecutions in the United States. Some of them went to jail. Some could never return home to visit friends and loved ones, forever exiled. Some even took their own lives.

After the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling and Enforcement Act in 2006, most offshore gambling sites stopped doing business with the American market. The UIGEA made it virtually impossible for Americans to deposit and withdraw money with gambling sites, even if the site was located somewhere where gambling was legal. Popular payment processors like NetTeller and PayPal stopped processing transactions between the U.S. and gambling sites, as well as every major credit card company and bank. As a result, many offshore sportsbooks who did business with Americans completely reinvented their operations. They kept their call centers and websites up, but stopped taking bets. Instead, they rented out their infrastructure to local bookies. For a monthly fee, bookies could give their customers a login to a website where they could make their bets. The website would update the lines and track the bets, but no money would ever change hands other than the monthly fee paid by the bookie. The idea was that the local bookie and their customers would settle up in person. The website never participated in those transactions.

These operations were known as “Pay Per Heads,” and they proliferated in the wake of the UIGEA. Many offshore sportsbook operators even decamped back to the United States to go back to booking bets on the street, going from proprietors of online sportsbooks to customers of online Pay Per Heads. “The best of the best, the upper echelon became the who’s who and everyone started copying their lines,” says Gadoon “Spanky” Kyrollos, a major American sports bettor and former customer of 5dimes. “Bookmakers used call centers in Costa Rica and a vanilla set of lines, processing the bets. Now the bookmaker doesn’t field any phone calls and doesn’t have to make a line. They just use a set of lines they copy from a major screen bookmaker.” This meant that many of the sportsbooks that had sprouted up in Costa Rica during internet gambling’s heyday had been reduced to zombie operations. They employed no oddsmakers, they didn’t trade off their action or monitor the games. They didn’t even handle any bets. They had become call centers for hire, who provided independent bookies the infrastructure of an online sportsbook, while simply copying the line moves of more established and larger bookmakers around the world, for as low as $10 a week.

Creighton tried to convert 5dimes to a Pay Per Head, but it didn’t last. “He was like Michael Jordan,” Howard says. “Going to Pay Per Head was like taking a lesser role.” “He was a betting bookie,” one of Creighton’s customers told me. “He needed to be in action.” As a Pay Per Head, Creighton could have earned a steady income from other bookies and steered clear of the long arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. But for Creighton, being in the gambling business was never just about money. “You’d have never even known he had so much money. He dressed like a slob. He drove himself around,” says Howard. “It wasn’t about money for him. It was about kicking someone’s ass and having them hang their head in shame.” Creighton wanted to be in that upper echelon, a major screen bookmaker. He quickly went back to booking bets, and unlike a number of his competitors, he never quit taking bets from Americans.

By 2016 the United States government was paying close attention to 5dimes. They knew that the company was still doing business with American customers, but they still didn’t know how nor did they have any idea who was running the show. Everyone knew the name 5dimes Tony, but few in the United States had ever seen a photo of him or even knew his real name. More than a decade on, despite being phenomenally wealthy and at the top of his industry, Creighton was still operating essentially anonymously.

The Homeland Security Investigation Division was looking into money laundering schemes on Amazon.com when they discovered a number of suspicious Amazon accounts tied to an IP address associated with 5dimes. They learned that 5dimes was using Amazon to process payments back and forth to American customers. The customer was told to purchase Amazon gift cards with cash, then email photos of the cards and receipts to 5dimes, who would then fund the customer’s betting account. If the customer won money, they were paid off with items shipped to them from Amazon, such as gold coins, Tiffany bracelets, or mink coats.

An HSI investigator named Geoffrey Gordon noticed that one of the accounts was being used to purchase things like office chairs, and he suspected that account was how 5dimes was processing their profits, rather than paying off winning players. He then noticed that the account he believed was used for 5dimes had sent over $168,000 in gold coins and a safe to an address in Pittsburgh, and had attempted to send nearly $500,000 more in gold to the same address before Amazon caught the suspicious transaction and cancelled it. Gordon thought the Pittsburgh address might be an important link to 5dimes, and not just another customer.

The woman who lived at the Pittsburgh address was named Allison Stawarz, and after doing some digging, Gordon found Stawarz’s name mentioned in an obituary for Marianne Creighton, Sean’s mother. He also found property that Stawarz and Creighton co-owned in West Virginia years before. It wasn’t long before Gordon could trace Creighton, who had been listed in court documents as a consultant to 5dimes, back to the sportsbook. Gordon was convinced that Creighton was Tony, the shadowy owner of 5dimes. In March of 2016, HSI seized the Amazon accounts, though 5dimes was able to clear most of the accounts prior to their seizure. Of the nearly $2,000,000 that was spread across 15 accounts, HSI only ended up with just over $150,000.

That same month, 5dimes came under scrutiny from Costa Rican authorities for large transactions between Banco de Costa Rica and accounts in both Malta and Dubai that appeared suspicious. With investigations coming from both the United States and Costa Rican governments, and Creighton’s identity now exposed, it seemed likely that 5dimes would go the way of many offshore sportsbooks that came before it. On sports betting messageboards 5dimes customers debated whether they should pull their money out of the site before it was seized by some government agency or spirited away by “5dimes Tony” as he made a run for it. But weeks later Costa Rica’s Deputy Prosecutor from the Office of Money Laundering, Alvaro Montoya, announced he would not pursue any charges against 5dimes, since the money involved was made through sports betting. “That is not a crime in Costa Rica, betting is not a crime,” Montoya told La Nación. “If they tell us that in the United States they are investigating 5dimes for laundering drug money, it would be different.” “5dimes Tony”, it appeared, would live to bet another day.

For the next two and a half years, he did exactly that. No longer able to move between Costa Rica and the United States as freely as before, Creighton settled in to Costa Rica and dug into his work. He continued to grow 5dimes’s footprint among gamblers around the world, expanding their betting options to include virtually any contest, from political elections to professional wrestling, and offering generous bonuses to new players. Throughout 2017, 5dimes remained one of the top rated sportsbooks in the world. All the while, Creighton kept his name out of company records, yet continued to directly run the operation himself.

V

On October 20th, 2018, the Costa Rica Star reported that OIJ authorities had located Sean Creighton’s body, citing an anonymous source. Rumors spread that he had been tortured for four days straight before he was killed and that his body had been buried deep in the woods in a national park. While news outlets ran wild with the story, members of the sports betting community were skeptical. On internet forums, some gamblers refused to believe that Tony was actually dead. Like Elvis or Tupac, Tony’s legend loomed so large that some gamblers could only believe that he had faked the whole thing and was hiding out somewhere.

Those fans weren’t alone in their disbelief. 5dimes denied the rumors in a press release that stated that he remained missing, and that their “thoughts and prayers join the rest of the online gambling industry for Tony’s safe return to his family. The OIJ also suspected that Creighton was alive. Their investigation of Creighton’s disappearance had led OIJ to a network of Central American counterfitters who made fake identification documents. They had a lead that Creighton had purchased his own false passport, one that said he was a Nicaraguan citizen. Given that the US government had recently identified Creighton and were actively pursuing him, and given that there was still no body to be found, it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility that what they were investigating wasn’t a kidnapping, but an elaborate ruse that involved Tony faking his own death.

VI

In the days after the kidnapping, Jorduan Morales Vega travelled through Panama to El Salvador, and eventually made his way to Cuba, where he withdrew the bitcoin funds. After staying in Cuba for a month, Morales Vega arrived in Spain on November 9th and met up with other members of his gang, which included his mother, his wife, and his uncle. But by then Spanish authorities were expecting them, having been tipped off by the OIJ that the kidnappers were headed their way.

Morales Vega must have felt the heat on the back of his neck. Wherever he or his family members went, they took cabs. Whenever they were asked for identifying information, they gave false names. Over the course of several weeks, Morales Vegas and his family changed residences several times, each time paying extravagant sums of money for rent. Whether Morales Vega knew it or not, his caution was warranted. Police were monitoring his every move, waiting for the right time to strike, hoping that Creighton was still with him.

The Christmas holidays came and went, and still no arrests were made. Nor had Creighton been located. Rumors were flying that Creighton was safe and sound and had changed his identity yet again. Others believed that Creighton was dead, his already-hidden fortune pilfered, and that no arrests would be made because every level of government was involved. 5dimes continued to operate without Creighton, taking wagers and setting odds as if nothing had happened. And in a way, nothing had. Creighton had lived so much of his life in secret, flying under the radar, taking great care to never use his real name or allow any photos to be made of him. For much of his life, he worked hard to make it seem like he didn’t exist at all. And now that he had vanished for real, outside of Creighton’s own family, it was hard for anyone to notice any real difference.

In January, more than three months after the kidnapping, it appeared Morales Vega was relaxing somewhat. No longer content to ride in cabs, he had inquired about purchasing a luxury SUV. He also moved his family into a large residence in Zaragoza, one that was big enough to fit his entire crew, who he had sent word to come join him in Spain. No sooner had Morales Vega settled in to the new and opulent home than Spanish Civil Guard officers came barging through the front doors. Police arrested Jorduan Morales Vega, his 45-year-old mother Guiselle Vega Aguirre, and his 24-year-old girlfriend, Maria Fernanda Solis Chaves.

That same day across the Atlantic, Costa Rican police attached a chain to a door of a dilapidated building and attached the other end to a truck. As the truck sped away, the metal door came flying off the hinges, allowing a phalanx of heavily armed officers to file into the building. In all, police conducted ten separate raids across the country and rounded up nine different suspects, including the two police officers suspected of pulling Creighton over the night he was abducted, and Morales Vega’s 71-year-old grandmother, Aguirre Leal, whose house was where the gang held Creighton the night he was kidnapped, and was the last place he was known to be alive. At Leal’s house, a team searched the basement wearing full biohazard suits, breaking the concrete floor and digging under the foundation.They also brought a backhoe and excavated the yard, searching for Creighton’s remains, but all they turned up was dirt. Two days later, Marci Gonzalez reported on the search for Good Morning America. “Police in Costa Rica say that with all of the digging in that basement and the yard of that home, they still have not found any evidence there,” Gonzalez said. “We spoke with Creighton’s family this weekend, and they are hopeful he still could be alive.”

Helberto Moreira, the lawyer who represented Morales Vega and many of the other kidnappers, said that his clients were caught up in an elaborate ruse, and that Creighton was alive and had faked his own death. “The line of the Public Ministry is that he was kidnapped and allegedly killed,” Moreira said. “The record shows that he was being summoned to appear (in the US) before his disappearance and alleged kidnapping.” Because Creighton’s identity had been uncovered by the Department of Homeland Security and a warrant issued in the United States for his arrest, Moreira argued Creighton concocted the entire scheme to escape justice.While Morales Vega and his mother and girlfriend waited in Spain to be extradited, the kidnappers in Costa Rica were sentenced to six months. The two police officers were let off with probation.

There was still no trace of Creighton, so no murder charges could be filed. Still, it seemed they were getting off easy for such a serious crime. The lack of public information about the case, the tight lips from 5dimes management and the government, the involvement of police officers who now were getting off virtually scott free, the maelstrom of rumors about Creighton’s fate—all of it combined to create the appearance of a conspiracy. And despite the relatively modest ransom of a million dollars, “5dimes Tony” was worth much, much more, and a lot of that fortune was squirreled away in secret accounts. The imagination can go many places if one lets it. “Honestly this isn’t a big country,” says Howard. “It wouldn’t take much money to buy off the entire government.”

In March of 2019, the Costa Rican tabloid Diario Extra reported that they had received a video of Creighton’s body being buried on a farm off Route 32. The video showed a body wrapped in black plastic being buried in a shallow grave. The source told Diario Extra that while Creighton was being held captive at the grandmother’s house, tied to a chair, he recognized one of his captors, a man who had once worked for Creighton as an employee at 5dimes. Having no other choice, the captors put a plastic bag over Creighton’s head and left him alone to suffocate. Once he had expired, they wrapped him in black plastic and buried him on the farm.

Watching the video, however, there was no indication that the body was Creighton’s. It wasn’t even evident that what was being buried was a body. The video may have been accurate, but it just as well could have been staged. And if the video was real, there wasn’t much reason for the source to provide it to the media without any specific information about where the body could be found. If the hoax theory was true, however, then an anonymous tip like this one made perfect sense. The OIJ quickly refuted the report, stating unequivocally that they had not located Creighton and still didn’t know if he was dead or alive. In late April Morales Vega and his family were finally extradited back to Costa Rica to await trial.

Six months later, on September 5, 2019, OIJ investigators searched a cemetery in the harbor town of Quepos, Puntarenas, about three hours from where Creighton was last seen alive. The investigators exhumed a crypt in the cemetery and discovered— naturally—human remains. But OIJ investigators were acting on yet another confidential tip that this was where the kidnappers had hidden Creighton’s body, so they intended to run forensic tests on the remains to determine if they belonged to the missing bookmaker. Teeth that were found matched Creighton’s dental records, and the OIJ announced they had at long last found “5dimes Tony.” ESPN confirmed the discovery soon after, with a quote from the US. State Department: “We can confirm Costa Rican authorities identified the remains of a US. citizen in Costa Rica.”

Some sports bettors, however, felt like they had seen this movie before. When David Purdum, the ESPN journalist who wrote the story, tweeted the statement from the State Department, it was met with replies of “he isn’t dead,” and “doesn’t state whom,” and “ya, just how Epstein ‘killed’ himself.” On the subreddit /r/sportsbook, one user commented “We should make it a tradition to find his body every year.”

The Costa Rica Prosecutor’s Office, too, were skeptical. Despite the OIJ’s announcement, the Prosecutor’s Office refused to confirm that the remains were in fact Creighton’s, saying they were waiting on a complete forensic report rather than just a dental examination. And Creighton’s wife and extended family (both of his parents are now deceased) requested a DNA test be conducted. As of this writing, the results of any DNA test had not yet been announced, and the question of whether “5dimes Tony” had been found was still uncertain.

VII

5dimes continues to operate in Costa Rica and is still one of the top-rated online sportsbooks in the world. And in the wake of the United States Supreme Court decision overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in May of last year, 13 states now permit sports betting, and another 30 plus the District of Columbia are currently moving in that direction. As each new state comes on board, thousands of Americans are placing bets on sports for the first time in their lives, and the image of the bookmaker and the sports gambler as shady characters thaws a little. Bookmaking was once a crime that landed Americans in prison or exiled them to small island nations. Today it is celebrated, and elected officials pose for photo ops with grandmothers in lavish sportsbooks in places like Iowa and Arkansas. Since June of 2018, Americans have already bet nearly ten billion dollars in newly licensed, legal sportsbooks, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profits and tax revenues.

Sports wagering companies from all over the world are setting up shop in the United States to take advantage. It’s a virtual gold rush, and everyone wants a piece of it. Even Sean Creighton’s home state of West Virginia now has a legal sportsbook. If Creighton is still alive somewhere, chances are he’s watching what’s happening in his homeland with a fair amount of surprise and resentment. Then again, he might be rooting for sports gambling’s continued growth and success. “If he was still alive, then he’d still be running 5dimes,” said Howard. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”

Perhaps Creighton did fake his own death. Perhaps, after fifteen years of operating in secret, the Department of Homeland Security uncovering his identity made it necessary for him to disappear, to give himself a fresh start somewhere. It would explain a lot. Like why someone went to such great lengths to try to convince the police that he was dead, but could never produce a body or any physical evidence. Or why none of the dozen people arrested for his disappearance have ever revealed what had happened to him. It’s also possible that the simplest explanation is also the truth:that the thieves who took Creighton also murdered him, hid his body, and will never speak of it aloud. In either event, whether Sean Creighton is dead or alive, “5dimes Tony” is gone forever.

“He was smart. He knew his business,” says one of Creighton’s customers when asked if he thought Creighton was alive or dead. “If you were going to bet on it, that bet will never be paid, because whether Tony’s dead or alive, nobody’s ever going to see him again.”

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY BUD SCHMELING

PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRAM PAULUSSEN

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

An eternity removed from the iconic breaks of Kuta Beach—celebrated in Endless Summer, the Citizen Kane of surf movies—is the Regency of Jembrana, the ground zero for makepung, or Balinese buffalo racing. At the crossroads of steeplechase, animal pageantry, and agrarian festival, the annual competition celebrates the end of the rice harvest with specially bred buffalos and their jockeys careening around a dirt track. The winning team is not determined entirely by speed—instead, judges look for a combination of strength, style, and flair.

The Jembrana Regent’s Cup is the highlight of the makepung circuit. The festivities commence in the early morning hours, before the oppressive heat renders the animals sluggish, with the garishly festooned buffalos participating in an elaborate fashion parade.

The racing buffalos, known as kerbau pepadu, are treated with great care and used primarily for stud. The jockeys traverse the 2 km course in traditional ploughs that are slightly modified for the sport. Once on the track, and upon reaching top speeds of 60 kph, things can become quite perilous—it’s not uncommon for both rider and animal to end up in a ditch.

Two teams—divided into red and green, representing the east and west of the province—battle over five hours, culminating with the jury raising a colored flag to decide the champion. Winning riders earn honor and, hopefully, an elevated market value for their bulls.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY TIM STRUBY

PHOTOGRAPHY BY NILS ERICSON

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

It was supposed to be an easy score. Get in, knock the kid unconscious, grab the drugs and get out. Nothing Jarrod Tillinghast hadn’t done a dozen times. His buddy Donny had been setting this kid up for weeks. First Donny bought a pound of weed. Then two. Now Donny wanted thirty pounds. But he had no intention of paying the $150K. This kid wasn’t with the cartel. He was white, a “goof” from Johnston, a town outside of Providence. This was free money.

Around 6pm, Jarrod slid into the passenger seat of his friend Rodney’s* Honda Prelude. On this steamy, summer day, Jarrod wore a white tank top, shorts and flip-flops. In his waistband he had a brown paper bag stacked full of newspaper strips, all torn into the size of $100 bills. He was nervous. Not scared nervous, but tense and hyper-vigilant, the same way he felt every time he’d stepped into the boxing ring. He didn’t know exactly how the robbery would go down; no two were ever exactly the same. But one thing was always certain. He wasn’t leaving without what he came for.

Thirty minutes later Jarrod stepped into the kid’s basement apartment. He didn’t like what he saw. Another guy sitting on the couch—the muscle. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go down, Jarrod protested. You trying to set me up? Rob me? I’m not comfortable with this shit. I’m going to get my friend Rodney.

With Rodney in the living room with the muscle, Jarrod followed the kid into the bedroom.

“Where’s the weed?” asked Jarrod.

“Where’s the money?” the kid replied.

Jarrod tossed the paper bag onto the bed. The kid opened the closet door and pointed to three green plastic trash bags. Bingo. But Tillinghast blinked. He looked at the kid’s face and his pleasant suburban apartment and couldn’t bring himself to knock him out. Instead the 27 year-old threw the kid down between the bed and the wall and turned towards Rodney.

“Grab the bags!” yelled Jarrod.

A second later, the kid grabbed a butcher’s knife he’d stashed under the bed and plunged it into Jarrod’s skull. A searing pain unlike anything he’d ever felt. Jarrod twisted the kid’s arm back and bit his finger until he dropped the knife. With the kid’s head wedged between the wall and the bed, Jarrod turned and looked in the mirror. Blood sprayed from his head like a fire hydrant without a cap. An inch either way, thought Tillinghast, and he could have lost an ear or an eye. Furious, he did what he did best. “I hit him with two left hooks,” says Tillinghast. “His whole face shattered.”

With the deftness of an athlete, he ran into the living room and knocked the other guy out, grabbed the three bags of weed and bolted for the door. As the two men charged up the stairs a pizza delivery guy was coming down. He screamed, dropped his pizza and backed against the wall with his hands up. If he hadn’t been drenched in blood, the pizza guy might have recognized Jarrod as one of the most promising young Providence boxers in recent memory. If he’d somehow heard Jarrod’s last name, he would have definitely known it belonged to one of Rhode Island’s most infamous crime families.

I.

It’s a Friday night in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood and 43 year-old Jarrod Tillinghast sits at the bar in Costantino’s Venda Bar and Ristorante. Built like a bank vault, he is preternaturally tan, owns a halogen smile, and scars dapple face like cave etchings, each one it’s own story. The street fight in Silver Lake. The bar brawl in downtown Providence. The butcher’s knife incident. “None of ‘em ever happened in the ring,” he proudly notes. “I didn’t like to get hit.” Without a word, Frankie, the bartender, refreshes Jarrod’s Tito’s and soda.

A couple across the bar recognizes him. They don’t approach, but Jarrod can feel their stares, sees their furtive whispers. Back in the day, depending on how much vodka he’d had, Jarrod might have taken umbrage. Maybe crossed the bar with his left arm locked and loaded. “I always liked to fight,” he concedes.

His first bout was at age four in the family home in Cranston. Tired of Jarrod arguing with his eight-year-old brother Gerry, their old man Jerry Sr. bought them boxing gloves (heavily padded ones for Gerry) and rearranged the furniture into a makeshift ring. But Jerry was too tall, too strong, and Jarrod got pushed around. Couldn’t get close. To even up the fight, their old man grabbed Gerry’s arms, allowing Jarrod to unleash his inner animal on his brother. “Jarrod tuned him up,” recalls the 71 year-old Jerry. “I couldn’t stop him. Gerry Jr.’s yelling, ‘That ain’t fair!’ I told him, ‘Life’s a bitch, kid.’”

Four years later, the old man wouldn’t be at the Coventry boxing gym to see young Jarrod’s next two fights. Jerry Sr. and his brother Harold were serving life sentences at MCI-Walpole (Massachusetts Correctional Institution) prison for the 1978 murder of loan shark George Basmajian.

“In the ’70s and ’80s in Providence you were either the cops or the robbers,” explains Seth DeRobbio, Jarrod’s cousin. “Our family was the robbers.” Since returning from Vietnam, Jerry Sr. had become a legendary enforcer for Raymond Patriarca, the godfather of New England organized crime. Jerry had allegedly been involved in the multi-million dollar Bonded Vault heist of 1975 (he was acquitted). He’d been a suspect in a plethora of murders. By the early ’80s, the Tillinghast name had become as well known in mobbed-up Providence as Gotti in New York and Bulger in Boston.

From maximum security, Jerry Sr. tried to keep his family together. He moved his wife Terry and the kids from Cranston to Walpole so they could visit regularly. He’d call home daily, speak regularly with guidance counselors, teachers and principals, and had his “spies” on the outside keep a close eye on his children for fear of retribution for the things he’d done to others in his line of work. If any of the kids acted out, Jerry Sr. would dole out the punishment. “He didn’t go to prison and disappear,” says Jarrod. “His power and control didn’t fade. It felt like he was always around.”

But the threads holding the family together unraveled. Jerry got transferred to a Florida prison. Jarrod’s mother slipped into cycles of abusive boyfriends, alcohol and drugs. By age 10, Jarrod’s home address depended on the day. One week he might stay with his grandmother in Providence, the next with Aunt Sissy in Cranston. His eight siblings boarded with other relatives around the state. Every so often Jarrod would move back in with his mother, but inevitably she’d break down again. “I looked up to normal families, their peace and stability,” says Jarrod. “I was always on edge. We weren’t the Brady Bunch. We were the Crazy Bunch.”

A molten rage began to build in Jarrod’s veins. Rage at his father for choosing a life that would take him away from his family forever. Rage at his mother, who didn’t have the strength to battle her demons. Rage over brothers and sisters who felt more like strangers than family. “Part of me was so angry,” he admits. “Sometimes I’d channel it for good, sometimes for bad.”

Good meant tearing it up on the diamond, the hardwood and the gridiron. Sports were everything Jarrod’s life wasn’t. There was order, stability. There were reliable teammates and dependable coaches. And that anger served him well whether it was striking out batters or breaking tackles. “He was fantastic,” recalls Jerry, who only got to see two games in person throughout Jarrod’s childhood. “He was quarterback, running back, and punter for the Edgewood Eagles. Scored a few TDs. He didn’t come off the field.”

Bad meant running the streets with his crew, Billy, Jamie, Johnny, Tony, Brian, and Jojo. Sometimes there’d be thirty or forty of them all hanging out at their spot, the park on Daniel Avenue in Silver Lake. They thrived on action, trouble, danger. Jarrod loved the danger; he was the son of a dangerous man and it ran in his DNA. He liked to hurt people because hurting others made him forget about his own pain. If the wrong kid walked past the park, he’d catch a beating. If the fellas were bored they’d go to The Wall on Plainfield Street or The Flats on Union Avenue and start shit with other kids. By the age of 15 Jarrod—by then a high school dropout—and the Silver Lake crew were boozing on The Hill at wiseguy watering holes like Bobo’s and brawling with bouncers and patrons at nightclubs like Confetti’s and Mecca.

With a handful of juvenile arrests for mayhem and assault, the Tillinghast name was back on the authorities’ radar. “We obviously knew who Jarrod was,” says Brian Andrews, a former detective commander for the Rhode Island State Police. “He and his friends were getting involved in low-level crime, smaller-time stuff. A lot of them were sons of mobsters so it wasn’t a surprise to see these guys do what they did.”

But Jarrod didn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. Find himself doing a 20-year bid. “I wasn’t set on breaking the law, being a wiseguy,” explains Jarrod. He also didn’t want to be known as Jerry Tillinghast’s kid. He wanted to make a name for himself, step out of that shadow. But no matter where the old man got transferred—Florida, New Hampshire, Massachusetts—his shadow loomed. “It affected all aspects of Jarrod’s life,” says DeRobbio. “You got cops looking at you, people in general looking at you. Like his father’s name was tattooed on his forehead.”

He may have not have known it at the time, but Jarrod was on a search. A search for an outlet that wouldn’t land him in jail. A place where he could combine his passion for sports and fighting. A way to shed the moniker of Jerry’s kid and finally be known as Jarrod. On a summer afternoon in 1990, he walked into Manfredo’s Gym on Manton Avenue and found precisely what he was looking for.

ii.

“Street kids are tough,” says veteran trainer and gym owner Peter Manfredo, Sr. “They’re not gonna take a shot and say ‘what am I doing?’ They’re gonna want to go again. Jarrod had that.” Over the next few weeks, the 16-year-old also showed innate talent: fluidity, movement, a tremendous left hook. Yet Manfredo, a longtime fixture on the Rhode Island boxing scene, also knew the significance of his new pupil’s last name. “We used to have to go to a lawyer’s office every Sunday and talk to Jerry over the phone,” says Manfredo. “His father wanted to know how it was going, who’s doing what and the next plan.”

The immediate plan? The 1991 Golden Gloves. Although Jarrod hadn’t ever fought in the ring, Manfredo figured they had nothing to lose. Worst case the kid gets some experience. Learns a little. In his first 156-pound bout, Jarrod squeaked by with a decision. He cruised in the second round, earned a bye in the third, and on February 7, 1991 he found himself at the P.A.L. boxing gym in Fall River, Massachusetts, minutes away from the biggest fight of his life: the Southern New England Golden Gloves novice 156-pound division title bout.

Hundreds of supporters had come; his whole Silver Lake Crew, his father’s friends, family, even old football coaches and teachers. This wouldn’t be a back alley, one-punch walkover. Jarrod’s opponent was a grown man named John Kimbrough. “He was like 30 years old,” recalls Tillinghast. “Batman, they called him.” To battle the nerves and the doubts that kept creeping up, the 16-year-old stared at the photo of his father he’d taped to the PAL wall. I am not going to lose, Jarrod told himself over and over. This guy is not going to take what I’m there for.

“Let’s roll, Tillinghast!” shouted Manfredo. “It’s time!”

In black shorts adorned with a skull-and-crossbones emblem, Jarrod walked towards the Fall River P.A.L. ring knowing there was more at stake than a trophy. Those hundreds of fans weren’t cheering for Jerry, but for him. To win meant doing something his father had never done. Something that could free Jarrod from that shadow. To lose? Unthinkable.

Local newspapers described it as a war. Back and forth, teenager versus adult. In the final round, Jarrod lost a point for repeatedly spitting out his mouthpiece. The fight was too close to tell until the referee raised Jarrod’s arm and the P.A.L. exploded with cheers. The new Golden Gloves champ drove back to Barry’s disco in Warwick where he and the Silver Lake boys partied until the sun came up.

For the next five years, Tillinghast tore up the amateurs, winning local and regional Golden Gloves championships. Three times he went to Nationals, only to lose to future pro standout Jose Spearman and World Champion Travis Simms. But more importantly than titles, Jarrod found a calling. “Boxing changed my life,” he says. “When I started fighting I wasn’t a loose cannon anymore.” This isn’t to say he became an alter boy. He still went out with the fellas. Still managed to mix it up on the streets. But he’d turned a corner. “I was proud of him,” says his father.

By 1996, Jarrod was ready to get serious, take his trade to the next level. “We talked about him going pro,” says Jerry Sr. “I was glad he was doing it. I told him if you’re gonna fight you might as well get paid for it.” 22-year-old Jarrod didn’t have any trouble finding a promoter. Jimmy Burchfield, Sr., the man behind Rhode Island’s CES Boxing, saw potential dollars and TV deals. “He was a promoter’s dream,” says Burchfield, Sr.. “He had a great left hook, was a good looking kid, and had a great following.” Burchfield, Sr. envisioned building up Tillinghast as he’d done with former world champion Vinny Pazienza.

Jarrod didn’t disappoint in his pro debut. On a June summer night, fans flocked to the Suffolk Downs racetrack in East Boston. Not all of them well-wishers. “Not everyone loved Jarrod’s family history,” explains Burchfield, Sr. “Like Ali, half of them came to see him win, the other half to see him lose.” Jarrod’s opponent, Robert Jones, came out swinging. “He threw two punches,” explains Jarrod. “But I weaved back, threw a left hook, and BOOM. First punch of the fight. Twelve seconds and he was done. They heard that left hook in the top of the balcony.”

Burchfield, Sr. hired Donny Denis, a renowned heavyweight from the ’70s and ’80s (who fought George Foreman and Gerry Cooney) to assist with training. The promoter brought Jarrod along slowly, building his confidence and honing his skills. Like Manfredo, Burchfield, Sr. had to deal with some unusual circumstances when it came to his young prospect. “I was worried that we’d get a judge who’d had a problem somewhere down the line involving Jarrod’s father,” he says. “So we had to do our homework regarding the officials.” Jarrod doubled-down on his commitment. “I had what it takes,” he says. “I knew I could be the best. That I could be champion.” By July of 1999, Jarrod was a perfect 7-0 and was on a trajectory to become the most famous Tillinghast in Rhode Island.

iii.

Sheets of rain swept across Route 37 that June, 2000 morning in Cranston. By the time Jarrod noticed the truck barreling down on him, it was too late. It smashed into the back of his black Cherokee. Jarrod’s niece in the back seat was unharmed, but the same couldn’t be said for his left elbow. Surgery repaired the torn ligament. Doctors also cleaned up bone spurs they discovered. Yet the real damage was the time he’d have to stay out of the ring—and the opportunity to revisit old habits.

Truth is, despite all the sweat and blood he shed while boxing, Jarrod never fully purged the street life. The Silver Lake boys weren’t simply friends; they were the only real family he had. Jarrod’s love of danger might have ebbed, but it hadn’t disappeared. Sometimes a man can only change so much. In between fights as both an amateur and a pro, Jarrod had still been putting back the Absolut-and-cranberries at Mecca, River Café and Remy’s. Still getting into the occasional brawl at nightclubs. Still dabbling in crime. Sidelined with his elbow injury and no fight in the foreseeable future, Jarrod fell right back into his Providence lifestyle. Only this time the stakes had gotten higher.

“We were criminals,” says Jarrod with a smile. What started with making fake IDs and selling stolen ’scripts evolved into a significant robbery enterprise. “We didn’t steal from business owners or shakedown hard working people,” clarifies Tillinghast. “We did things where the law wouldn’t be able to come back on us.” Specifically, they ripped off drug dealers and criminals.

“Robbing drug dealers was very common back then,” says Andrews. “It started with Raymond Patriarca.” While the Silver Lake crew didn’t have the clout or scope of Patriarca’s crime family, they were out “hunting” every night, a territory that included Rhode Island as well as parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut. “Now we weren’t robbing from Colombian cartels,” explains Johnny Angell, one of Tillinghast’s closest friends. “We knew better. We found the guys who shouldn’t be doing it. The wanna-be drug dealers.”

Some wannabes were kids slinging on the corner. “We’d dress in jeans and polo shirts like undercover cops,” explains Jarrod. “Then we’d roll up on them and jump out of the car yelling ‘Get on the ground!’” The dealers, thinking they’d been busted, would fall face first onto the street and give up their stash without a word.

They also found a trove of wannabes in the popular after-hours and rave scene. “Everyone was so happy-go-lucky in those places,” laughs Jarrod. “It was like fishing in a pool.” Jarrod and a few Silver lake boys would show up and ask around about buying some ecstasy. Within minutes a fresh-faced kid with a backpack brimming with X would appear. Instead of a sale, the kid would find himself hauled outside and getting arrested. Or so he thought. “I’d sit him on the curb and get on the phone and pretend I’m calling it in,” explains Jarrod. “I’d be like ‘yeah, I don’t know what to do with this kid. What do you think?’ I’d pretend to listen to an answer and I’d hang up and turn to the kid and say ‘today’s your lucky day,’ as I confiscated the backpack. These kids were so happy not to be going to jail they’d thank me.” While he admits he was a criminal, Tillinghast still conducted himself with a code. “Jarrod hated guns,” says Angell. “He never used ’em. He’d just beat your fucking skull in.”

Sometimes, according to Tillinghast, the dealers would go crying to wiseguys. Ask them to help get back their drugs. But the Silver Lake boys never complied. And Jarrod wasn’t worried about payback. “I got a pass for my dad, my name,” he says. “It gave me leverage. People were gonna think twice about retaliation.”

Jarrod shared his father’s last name, dabbled in the same line of work. but Jarrod was not Jerry. “Jerry Tillinghast was well known for robbing drug dealers,” notes Andrews. But Jarrod’s father’s M.O. wasn’t a left hook. Jerry was a suspect in the torture and murder of a pair of drug dealers/nightclub owners from Johnston as well as Elliott Bassett, a dealer from Dorchester who was thrown to his death from a New York City hotel window.

You’d think that during their regular phone calls Jarrod might brag about his latest score. Or maybe ask his father for counsel. But Jarrod kept his dad in the dark. “I never told him about robbing,” says Jarrod. “He didn’t want me in trouble. Didn’t want me to go down that path. That I was sure of. So the less he knew the better.”

But why risk his boxing career—and potentially his life—at all? For one, money. Jarrod claims to have made upwards of $150,000 one year. Another reason? The rush. “It was fun,” admits Jarrod. “The robbing, the cash. We had a lotta of laughs.”

Maybe too much fun. Months running the streets with his Silver Lake crew turned into years. His elbow had long healed but Jarrod didn’t walk back into Manfredo’s gym. He couldn’t bring himself to lace up the gloves. Jarrod points to his arm, claims the pain never went away. But more likely it was his heart and the fire that had gone out. In 1991, fellow Rhode Islander Pazienza also suffered a car accident. Broke his neck. Thirteen months later he returned to the ring and beat future WBC champ Luis Santana. “To get back in that ring by yourself takes a special person,” says Burchfield, Sr.. “You have to have a hunger. When you take a long break, get out of that rhythm, you’re making money and not taking punches, why then go back?”

iv.

Hunger comes in many forms. At 31, Jarrod no longer had the hunger of a pissed off teenager trying to outshine his old man. With a union job as a Rhode Island building inspector, he’d never know the desperation to keep a roof over his head or put food on the table. But in 2006 Tillinghast once again found his hunger—through love.

He met Jordana Ruggeri in the spring. She had the looks, the personality, and the pedigree; a monied, upper-middle-class family— The Brady Bunch that Tillinghast had dreamed about since he could walk. That October the pair went to see Peter Manfredo Jr. fight at Providence’s Dunkin’ Donuts Civic Center. Jordana had gone to school with Manfredo Jr. and she, like the whole crowd, went crazy as he TKO’d undefeated prospect Joe Spina. Jarrod heard the cheering and saw the awe in his girl’s eyes and suddenly something clicked.

See, that night Jarrod got stabbed with the butcher’s knife changed him. Rodney drove him to Miriam Hospital and somehow he skated out of there with only 40-plus stitches. The cops never found out, the kid he robbed never came back at him, and he didn’t have to spend the next few years looking over his shoulder. But in addition to the scar, Jarrod came away with a vision he couldn’t shake. The future. A future in a cell like his father. Or worse. So after his wound healed, he began to back away from the street life. Distance himself, just a bit, from the Silver Lake boys. He still wanted something more in life. A chance to remind people of his first name, not his last. There, ringside at the Civic Center, the voice that had been whispering “what if?” in Jarrod’s head for the past eight years began screaming. I got a lot left on the table. I can finish what I started.

He called his longtime friend Joey Acciardo, a football coach at Johnston High School. Within a week Jarrod was sucking wind every morning at dawn doing wind sprints, steps, and gassers with the team. “Did I ask myself if I was making the right decision?” says Tillinghast. “Yeah. Every time that alarm went off.” After three weeks with Acciardo, Jarrod returned to the boxing gym. Working the floor and the treadmill. Sparring, lightly at first, one, two, three rounds. Two months in and Tillinghast had a familiar sensation: he felt, once again, like a fighter.

“A bunch of times he’d talked about coming back but never did it,” recalls his cousin DeRobbio. “This time was different. We were excited for him. He got into great shape. Would he be champ? Anything can happen. But he definitely had something left.”

Eventually Burchfield, Sr. got a call. “I told him get a good physical,” says the promoter. “If the doc says okay, I’ll get you a fight. No problem.” In the first week of May 2007, Tillinghast, in a brown suit and tie, addressed the media about his comeback fight, a card headlined by Manfredo Jr. “I feel like a big brother lost from his family getting reunited again,” said Jarrod. “I’m back. I’m gonna put a couple of years in before fighting for a championship myself.”

The following Friday, the Tillinghast faithful packed the Twin River Event Center in Lincoln, Rhode Island. Jarrod hoped that one fan in particular would be ringside. Jerry Tillinghast, Sr. On January 18, 2007, Jerry walked out of the John J. Moran Security Facility of the Massachusetts ACI (Adult Correctional Institutions) after nearly 30 years in prison. But that seat for the fight would remain empty. “I wanted to go but my parole officer said I couldn’t,” says Jerry. “I got mad. I asked ‘why not?’ He said it was the atmosphere. Not good for guys like me.”

Around 9pm, fans stood up as the lights dimmed. “Wel-come back!” blared out of the arena speakers. “Your dreams are your ticket out.” In his skull-and-crossbones shorts, Jarrod entered the ring to the theme of the hit ’70s TV sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.” The fight, however, would be far from a joke. His opponent, Jeffrey Osbourne, Jr. (4-4-1) of Davenport, Iowa, wasn’t some hillbilly pushover, but a guy who’d gone to war with five top prospects.

Within the first minute of the bout, Tillinghast’s comeback was in jeopardy. An Osbourne overhand right crushed Jarrod’s nose, spraying blood across his face. But by the second round, the hometown favorite had settled down. Eight-year layoff? Looked like eight months. Jarrod flashed firepower, danced around the ring, traded bombs with the relentless Osbourne. “This looks like a championship fight!” yelled TV announcer Vinny Pazienza. With the crowd standing for the entire fourth round, Jarrod unleashed a furious barrage of left hooks and right hands. Yet the Iowa middleweight wouldn’t go down; and as the final bell rang, the decision was in the hands of the judges. “After four rounds we have your decision,” proclaimed ring announcer John Vena. “Your winner and still-undefeated Jarrod Tillinghast!”

“It’s hard to describe how you feel at that moment,” says Jarrod, who jumped up and down then lifted Osbourne’ hand in the air out of respect. “Hearing your name again like that? It’s electric. A high only a fighter knows.”

For Fight of the Night honors, Jarrod earned a $1K bonus. Anxious to maintain the momentum, Burchfield, Sr. put Tillinghast on a card the following month at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. Again he electrified the fans, knocking Santiago Hillario unconscious in the first round with a brutal left hook.

It would be the last time Jarrod ever stepped in the ring to fight.

V.

Mist falls on a Saturday night on The Hill, and Jarrod sits in his regular corner of Costantino’s Venda Bar and Ristorante. As the former fighter waits for his boys to show, he sips his Tito’s and soda and tries to explain his decision to leave boxing for a second time. Pressure from his future father-in-law, he says. Get a degree. Go legit. Civilized adults don’t dole out punishment for a living. So a few before days before his August 10^th bout at Twin River, Jarrod called Burchfield, Sr. and said he was taking another break. Over the next few years he got a B.A. in Education online from Ashwood University, married Ruggeri in 2011, and had two sons, Sebastian and Julian. “I’ve wanted kids all my life,” beams Tillinghast. “I’m a great daddy.”

As for his own father, Jarrod was thrilled to see him walk free. Happy to have him around. They love each other and both would probably take a bullet for the other, but their relationship is still complicated. “When I came home I said, ‘Listen, we’re not playing catch up,’” says Jerry, in regard to lingering resentment. “‘I’m sorry. I love you. But either we move on together or we don’t. It’s your choice.’” Jarrod insists it’s not his anger that has caused friction but three decades of institutionalized living. “Was I mad at him for spending going to jail? There were moments I was pissed,” says Jarrod. “But I’m over that. I just figured when he came home we’d spend more time together. I guess everyone’s different though. He was programmed different. He’s used to being alone.”

Even with the recent separation from his wife, Jarrod insists life couldn’t be better. For work, he does a bit of private training at Balletto’s Gym in Silver Lake and has recently gotten involved in a VIP travel club that he describes as “Netflix for vacations.” He can’t walk through Providence without friends honking their horn or well wishers him stopping to say hello. He needs an assistant to keep track of his love life.

Despite his laughter and indefatigable optimism, Jarrod can’t fully mask tinges of regret. The choices made. The haunting vestiges of what might have been. A deadly puncher. He could have been a franchise. His people didn’t care what ticket prices were, they wanted to see him. You don’t have that with a lot of fighters. “I left boxing the first time for the wrong reasons,” says Jarrod, stirring his drink. “The second time I left for the right reasons. Both sucked.”

After a couple more Tito’s and sodas, Jarrod mentions an idea he’s had lately. A comeback. “I’m at a five in terms of shape right now, but I’m coming down from 240.” With every sentence his voice grows more animated. “I’d have another fight for all the right reasons. I know at this age the stakes are never higher. My health, my kids. I don’t want to get hurt. But at the same time it’s 100% on the table. It’s why I’m getting down in weight and then I’ll make a decision. I’d still sell seats.”

“I always say I have a first name before a last. My dad is my dad. I’m Jarrod. A whole other beast. And if you don’t respect Jarrod there’s going to be serious trouble. Never mind the dog, beware of the owner.”

He smiles and finishes his drink. Then he looks over his shoulder to check if any of his Silver Lake boys are rolling up. But through the restaurant window he sees nothing but the dark, misty night.

Some names and identifying features in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY BRENDAN O’CONNOR

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN AHEARN AND RIGOBERTO TORRES

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

John Ahearn’s second-floor studio is above a tire shop in the Bronx neighborhood of Mott Haven. Ahearn, bright-eyed and wide-jawed, is dressed in all white, down to his sneakers. “Come in, come in,” he says. “But watch out—people are losing their heads in here.” He picks up a plaster skull and waves it around, grinning.

His studio is full of projects in various states of completion. Ahearn is both quiet and energetic, interrupting himself repeatedly to clarify and ask questions that he immediately answers. He envies the street-level porousness of the tire shop: people walking by can peek in and see what’s happening; those working inside can look out and watch the neighborhood go by.

For more than three decades, Ahearn has been taking molds of people and casting them in plaster—often on the street right outside a studio or gallery. Although he now lives in Harlem, Ahearn, born and raised in Binghamton, New York, has been working in the Bronx since 1980. Then 27, he was pulled out of the East Village and Soho scene by the Fashion Moda Gallery in the South Bronx, an alternative art space where Jenny Holzer and Keith Haring drew inspiration from graffiti writers like John ‘Crash’ Matos and Chris ‘Daze’ Ellis. (Today, Crash and Daze have workspaces in the same building as Ahearn.) In June 1980, Ahearn planned and participated in the momentous Times Square Show, a partnership between Fashion Moda and the Soho-based artist group Collaborative Projects, Inc., which featured dozens of now-famous artists. A year later, influential collectors Mera and Don Rubell purchased Ahearn’s “Sneakertown, USA,” hanging it in their townhouse next to a Haring and a Basquiat.

When Rigoberto Torres met Ahearn at Fashion Moda, he was only 18 years old, working odd jobs around the city (including casting and painting religious figures at his uncle’s statuary factory). Torres approached the older artist to ask him to be his teacher, but soon they were working as creative partners, and Torres convinced Ahearn to move to the South Bronx. Far removed from the downtown art scene, the South Bronx was part of the poorest congressional district in the country and had an exceedingly high murder rate. For the next 15 years or so, Ahearn and Torres cast anyone who was willing, working out of two ground-level rooms Ahearn rented in a building on Walton Avenue.

Ahearn and Torres’ sculptures are, broadly speaking, lifelike, and are made to resemble the people who’ve been cast—but they are not strictly realistic. Part of that is a function of their artistic method, which is called “lifecasting”: a subject lies on the floor, and his or her face (or limbs, torso, shoulders) is covered with alginate, a gummy substance used in dentistry and also as an additive to thicken drinks. The subject breathes through a pair of straws in the nostrils while plaster bandages are applied. These harden into a mold that is filled sometimes with bronze or fiberglass but most often with plaster, which Ahearn and Torres then carve and paint, each in his own style.

For their subjects, the process can be claustrophobic. “I don’t like to make people suffer, and I don’t like to create anxiety in them. I feel badly that the practice I have involves so much anxiety and sense of risk. But there is a positive side to it, which is that the people who get involved also demonstrate to themselves and others what they’re capable of—so they’re actually collaborating with me to create something,” he says. “In some ways, 90 percent of the thing was figured out automatically the first time I did it. So, one could say, ‘Why don’t you go on to do other things?’ But the repetition of this activity sustains me. It’s a kind of relationship, my doing this, with someone else being there.”

That relationship works both ways. Homes throughout the South Bronx still contain plaster castings of family members done by Ahearn and Torres, and sculptural scenes of people from around the area endure on the sides of four buildings: “Double Dutch at Kelly Street,” “Life on Dawson Street,” “We Are a Family,” and “Back to School.” All were cast from people Ahearn and Torres knew from the neighborhood. Recently, a man named Quito, whom Ahearn had cast years ago, found Ahearn’s new studio and brought him his sculpture to be repaired. The nose had broken off.

In 1991, after winning a major commission, Ahearn (working without Torres) installed three bronze sculptures on pedestals at the corner of Jerome Avenue and 169th Street, facing the 44th Police Precinct. They were made from molds of 33-year-old Raymond Garcia, 24-year-old Corey Mann, and 14-year-old Daleesha, all of who lived on the same street as Ahearn. Ahearn cast Garcia with his pit bull; Mann was depicted shirtless, with a boombox and basketball; and Daleesha sported a pair of white high-top roller skates. The installation provoked an outcry from a small group of city bureaucrats from outside the neighborhood, who accused Ahearn, who is white, of being racist, naive, or both. The sculptures were removed after five days.

At the time, Ahearn said that the statues were a challenge to the police to accept the humanity of those they were charged to serve; critics said the statues affirmed negative stereotypes. But Ahearn’s pieces were all lifecasts of real people, Jane Kramer pointed out in a lengthy New Yorker piece published a little over a year later. “Those people are not models for other characters, the way Caravaggio’s neighbors were models for Mary Magdalene or St. Paul. They carry their own history and their own names,” she wrote. “The fact is that any society in which no one has the right to speak for others, or represent others—in a congress, in a piece of sculpture, in a poem—is not just a reduction but a reductio ad absurdum. The categories of representation become monstrously small.”

Ahearn and Torres eventually left the Walton Avenue studio, but the pair continued to collaborate on projects, much of it public art, around the world—including one in Torres’ birthplace of Puerto Rico, in a town called Caguas.

In 2002, the governor of Puerto Rico announced the Puerto Rico Public Art Project, an allocation of $15 million to commission over 100 works of public art around the island. One commission was for something that came to be called “The Basketball Project.” It was stalled when none of the submitted ideas were found to be satisfactory—until Ahearn and Torres were invited to submit a proposal. “The idea was that we were gonna combine professional basketball players in Puerto Rico with kids… It was very vague.”

That uncertainty is part of Ahearn’s process. “Often that first, initial month, when you land and you just begin, is the time of crucial discovery, when you find out what is it you are really doing,” he says. “I hate to imagine things in advance and make something up. Like, to dream of something—it’s not the kind of art that I do.” Ahearn’s art is reactive, growing out of and into a specific place, in collaboration with and inspired by the people he is casting.

As it turned out, the initial site that had been identified for the Basketball Project was a public housing development that, after Ahearn and Torres’ first visit, ended up being slated for demolition. This led the pair to a sports facility in Caguas, the Complejo Deportivo, which was interested in commissioning a piece. Once they arrived, however, the artists realized that while the complex would provide inspiration and subjects for the project, it was not the best place for a mural. “One of my favorite things in Puerto Rico is that each city and town has a beautiful plaza that was built when the town was originally built,” Ahearn says. “There is a beautiful mall, the original mall of Caguas, that I thought was dying for attention. It was in great shape, and I saw a wall there. We asked, right in the first visit, ‘Please, let us put the art in the plaza, not in the sports center.’” Approval was granted, and the project moved forward.

The Basketball Project, as the name would imply, was at first intended to be solely about basketball. The completed wall, however, includes 16 different athletes performing four different sports across five panels: three swimmers, diving off their blocks; Peter John Ramos, the 18-year old, 7’4” star of the under-25s semi-professional basketball team Los Criollos, throwing up a hookshot; a little boy dribbling through four others with, one imagines, more intent than skill; two boxers, the great Juan Felix ‘Tito’ Trinidad Garcia and the then-up-and-coming Juan Manuel ‘Juanma’ Lopez Rivera, plus two kids sparring; and three young women practicing volleyball.

At one point, Ahearn leans in close. “You know,” he says, “Some people insist that the American system has a kind of stranglehold on Puerto Rico.” He describes a conversation with his wife, Juanita, who is Puerto Rican: “She always uses the word ‘colonial.’ And I’m like, ‘Come on Juanita, it’s not a colony.’ She goes….” Ahearn stops, raises an eyebrow dramatically, and laughs. In the context of postcolonial anxiety, the Basketball Project is a piece of public art that Ahearn hopes might offer some relief. “These are activities that have absolutely nothing to do with tourism, nothing to do with selling the idea of a Puerto Rican or Latino person in the greater, outside world. This is something that refers to their value system: what they believe in, in their lives,” he says. It is the product of working with real people—some known to the world, some known only to their immediate community. They are not models for other characters but simply themselves, doing what they do.

Ahearn and Torres’ work—especially their public work—is very much about the relationships it facilitates in its production and consumption. Ahearn, a practicing Catholic, grew up attending a tiny church. “It was loaded with statuary all over the place,” Ahearn says. “I’m sure I got some ideas from that—ideas about bad art, how to love things that aren’t very well done, that aren’t the masterworks. There’s something else to art besides reaching that pinnacle.” The point of religious statuary, whether it’s in a church or someone’s living room, isn’t whether it’s fine sculpture or not, Ahearn says. “It’s a transcendental presence in people’s lives.”

At 64, Ahearn is again a part of a massive group show, MoMA PS1’s Greater New York. He also mounted a joint show with photographer Martha Cooper at Dorian Grey Gallery in the East Village. But despite the challenges he’s faced, both in New York and Puerto Rico—the building on which the Sports Wall was installed was later renovated, altering the mural without his permission—Ahearn has kept his faith in the power of public art.

“Making public work is the best relationship with the people that you’re working with, because you’re doing something which is going to be shared by a larger community,” Ahearn says. “It’s for Caguas, or for anyone that passes through to see it. In that sense, it gives a lot more vitality to the activity of the making of the thing, because you know you’ve got a shared purpose—you’re doing this together, so that together you can have it in the future.”

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

WORDS BY LAURA YAN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL OVERBECK AND ZACHARY MOXLEY

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

Spencer Seabrooke takes a deep breath. He’s up high—290 meters, or about level with a 70-story skyscraper. If he dropped a rock, it would take eight seconds before he’d hear it land. Before him is a slackline stretched between a gaping gully. He steps on the line and falls almost immediately. He catches himself, hands and ankles clasped around the line, and swings back up to sitting, then standing. His harness is not secured to the line. If he loses his footing and doesn’t catch, he’d fall all the way down.

He lets out a roar. He starts walking, a tiny figure silhouetted against the distant mountains, arms swimming for balance, grunting as he takes step after step toward the other side.

It’s August 2, 2015, and Seabrooke is on the north gully of the Stawamus Chief, a granite dome in Squamish, BC. He’s here to break a world record by walking 64 meters across a highline: a loosely tensioned, one-inch-wide piece of polyester webbing, and he’s doing it untethered, without the protection of a safety leash.

The very first time he came to the gully, before the line known as “the Itus” existed, he remembers telling his friend, “This is the record. This is the one, for sure.” Then he laughed. It seemed impossible.

Seabrooke saw highlining for the first time at a film festival in May 2012. In one documentary, he watched American daredevil Andy Lewis (nicknamed “Sketchy Andy” for his questionable antics) trickline, longline, highline, waterline, BASE jump, and perform various tricks with a macho bravado and a brassy sense of humor that Seabrooke admired. Lewis is only two years older than Seabrooke, but his long list of death-defying exploits has earned him a reputation in the adventure-sports community that borders on legendary. In 2012, Lewis brought slacklining to a mainstream audience, tricklining in a gladiator-style dress next to Madonna during the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

It was Lewis who coined the term and the philosophy of the “slacklife.” In 2011, he’d set the free solo highlining world record, crossing a 55-meter-long, 60-meter-high line in the rust-colored Highlands Bowl of Moab, Utah.

As Seabrooke watched Lewis on film, he began to imagine himself highlining in the mountains around BC. “I walked out of there a different person,” he says.

Two weeks later, he went to an outdoor supply store, bought a slackline for $80, and set it up in his best friend Brent Plumley’s garage. He spent an hour or two struggling to get across. “I expected that it would be easier,” he recalls. He would go inside to watch a video of some-one doing tricks on the line, then get frustrated with his own progress. But he kept at it.

After a few days, Seabrooke could walk back and forth. Three weeks later, in July of 2012, he set up the line in a park, high in the trees. Three months later, he went to North Vancouver with an inexperienced friend to rig his first exposed highline.

“He’s never experienced pain like other kids,” says Maureen Kimble, Seabrooke’s mom. She is a sprightly woman with bright eyes, a closely cropped pixie cut, and an enthusiasm she clearly passed on to her son. She tells me about an instance shortly after he started kindergarten when he was run over by a bus. He had multiple fractures in his arm and tire marks in his skin. Kimble met him in the emergency room. “He was so not worried about it,” she says. The tread marks were etched in his flesh for weeks.

While he was getting his cast changed, a stranger saw him in the elevator.

“What happened to you, little boy?”

“Oh I got ran over by a bus,” Spencer lisped. “But it was just a little bus.”

Kimble laughs. “That was when I knew he was a special kid.” Seabrooke was born and raised in Peterborough, Ontario, a city of about 100,000 that felt like the biggest small town in Canada. He has two older sisters, each a year apart. The siblings grew up close. Kimble described it as “having a sleepover every night at your house.” The kids shared two bedrooms—the girls on bunk beds in one room, Spencer in the other—but she’d often wake up and find all three of them curled up on the large bottom bunk.

He hated to sit still. His favorite winter sport was snowboarding, and his favorite summer activity was running off to the woods with a hammer, building forts high in the trees. Seabrooke became the provincial snowboarding champion in Ontario, but couldn’t go to the nationals because he was too young to qualify for the insurance (the minimum age was 15, and Seabrooke was only 13). He got into skateboarding—though he was never good at the technical tricks, he could leap off big sets of stairs without trepidation.

Shortly after Seabrooke moved to Vancouver in 2011, he and Brent Plumley became excited about rock climbing. After climbing short sport routes with pre-bolted anchors, and mostly in gyms, the two decided to drive about an hour north of the city and embark on an ambitious project on the Chief: a multi-pitch, traditional route (which requires the climber to place protection into the rock as he climbs), using brand-new equipment. They actually ended up climbing the wrong route, and Seabrooke didn’t place his first piece of protection until the third pitch. Some climbers would call this reckless; Seabrooke and Plumley called it “adventure climbing.”

In October 2012, Seabrooke and his friend hiked up Crown Mountain, just above North Vancouver, carrying a heavy bag full of gear. They’d planned to bolt the anchors for a highline, then rappel their way down. But a windstorm hit while they set up camp. They were perched on a small, flat ledge in a cheap nylon tent. “Behind us was a 1,000 feet drop, in front of us was a slope that led into death,” Seabrooke says. They worried that the wind would topple them over the edge. They checked the weather, a little frantic. The winds were going to die down at 2am, which meant they had 12 hours to wait out the storm. They huddled inside the tent, and took shots of whiskey to get through the night.

In the morning, the clouds were so thick “you couldn’t see the city, you couldn’t see anything,” Seabrooke says. He hiked up to rig the line. He’d never set up a highline before, but he understood the concept: tie the slackline to a main anchor point, backup the anchor, and backup the line with a climbing rope underneath it. He made a leash using a steel ring and a length of rope that he hooked to his harness.

He felt the vertigo as soon as he stepped out. He tried to calm himself as he scooted forward little by little to secure the climbing rope. When he finished, he stood up back on the cliff. The fluorescent lime-green of the line glowed against the clouds. “It just got to the moment where I had to push myself,” he remembers. Walking away wasn’t an option. “I was there, I’d put in the work, other people had put in the work. I was going to fucking do it.”

He began his first real highline walk. He fell right away, latching himself onto the line. He hoisted himself up and tried again. “Every step was completely a fighting battle,” he says. The line swayed from side to side, mirroring his shaking body. When he finally made it across, he sunk to his knees. Then he stood up and raised his hands to the sky. When people watch highlining, the most common reaction is: That’s crazy. Why would anyone ever do that?

“Well, why wouldn’t you?” Seabrooke replies. To Seabrooke, free solo highlining is simply the “natural progression” of the sport: you start on lines close to the ground, then you walk up high, then you walk unleashed and free. But he’s one of only a handful of highliners around the world who walk untethered, and one of the only ones who do so in BC.

Though the history of rope walking traces back thou-sands of years, modern-day slacklines were developed by Yosemite Valley rock climbers in the 1980s as a way to train for balance. Unlike a tightrope, which is thin, taut, and unmoving, a slackline is nylon or polyester webbing with slack in it, which demands even greater balance.

In the past five years or so, slacklining has blossomed into a sport of its own, separate from rock climbing. You may have seen barefoot slackliners wobble across lines rigged in parks in San Francisco or New York, or seen mini-lines set up in climbing gyms. There are subgenres of slacklining: tricklining is all backflips, spins, and handstands on thicker webbing; some slackliners surf and sway on long, loose, parabola-shaped rodeo lines, while others test their balance and focus on longlines, or raise the stakes with midlines and highlines. Slackliners learn to trust the line with their body weight, training muscles and gaining coordination. The one constant is that as soon as you step on an exposed highline, everything changes.

The psychological block, that clinging fear, is the hardest thing to overcome. Jonathan Hill, an ex-rugby player turned self-described “mindful slack guru,” describes highlining as 90 percent focus, 10 percent ability. “You feel so small in the open,” Hill says. The exposure changes everything. “You have to train the mind like a muscle. Be completely in the present.” A slight waver in your focus, a slight inkling of fear, and you’ll fall. Highlining is being present taken to the extreme.

Before he became a full-time slackliner, Seabrooke spent five days a week driving to construction sites around Vancouver. He’d sip coffee, smoke cigarettes, and joke with the other guys as they waited for a lurching concrete truck to show. His work was to turn the liquid mixture into a smooth, buttery surface, and wait for it to harden into foundations and walls and sidewalks.

Seabrooke discovered a knack for working with concrete when he was in high school, and he’s been doing it to make a living ever since. He finds joy in concrete: “It has such life to it,” he says. For a while, he even had his own concrete company in Calgary, with friends and family who worked for him.

Working with concrete can be hectic, stressful work, but he enjoys the hard labor. “I like suffering,” he says. It’s the same when he’s hiking steep trails, carrying a backpack with 100 pounds of highlining gear, and there comes a moment when he’s halfway up and his legs are burning. “You’re like, fuck, what am I doing?” he says. “That’s what I live for, to get to the top after that. What is it? You’re tired? What does tired mean? Just keep going. Keep putting yourself through that. Is this fun? Yes, yes, this is fun.”

Seabrooke currently lives in a van parked outside of the garage of a house full of highliners in East Vancouver. He’s been living in his van for two years now; the money he saves from rent goes toward gear and travel, and he’s managed to make a cozy living room out of the garage. Slacklining and climbing equipment hangs on one wall, and his collection of hats on another. A friend made him a carved wooden skull with the inscription never die on the back. It sits on a shelf. In the wet, dreary days of winter, Seabrooke gets restless. He’s been recovering from a knee injury—a torn meniscus from slacklining last November.

On a gloomy winter’s day in December of 2015, I asked him about free soloing, and whether he was afraid of death. “No, are you?” he replies immediately. “We’re all gonna die someday. I’m not reckless. I feel more in control free soloing on a slackline than driving down the highway.”

Six months after walking his first highline on Crown Mountain, Seabrooke bolted the anchors for his most difficult and most ambitious highline yet. He spent a whole weekend in the north gully of the Chief, simply trying to get the line across. Normally, he spooled string around a rock, and with a few confident throws, could land it on the other side. This time, he tried using a fishing rod, then a bow and arrow. He climbed up and down, seeking better spots, but nothing was working. That weekend, the Itus earned its nickname. “It became this disease to me, this problem—I just couldn’t get rid of it.”

Seabrooke sought a cure. He went to a Carleton Rescue store and explained that he needed a way to get across a 60-plus-meter gap. They had just the thing: a rope gun made for chairlift rescues called the Line Launcher. Seabrooke bought a canister of string—some 950 feet of it—and hiked back up the Chief with a few friends. There were a few promising launches. The third time, he got very, very close. He had enough string left for one last shot.

It arced perfectly across the gully and caught in a tree. His friends burst into cheers—as Seabrooke watched the string on their end slip off the edge. “I think I cried then,” he admits. “I was really, really disappointed.”

A few weeks later, two highliners from Seattle, Ben Plotkin and Karl Marrs, came to town, interested in rigging a bigger line. Seabrooke told them about his struggle on the Itus. With the help of the Americans—and the Line Launcher—they finally rigged it. Seabrooke envisioned himself soloing the line that weekend, but instead, he faltered and decided to wear a leash. The Americans had used a nylon webbing that he wasn’t used to. “It was ridiculous,” he says, “so loose and so high.” The line was harder than anything he’d ever tried. “It was really humbling.”

By the end of the day, he’d made it across the line, albeit with many falls. He’d crossed it—but so had the Americans. “Part of me was a little upset that I didn’t get to be the first one to walk it, but I saw it was possible.” Plotkin and Marrs left the string across the gully, so the next weekend, Seabrooke returned to re-rig it. His friends camped on one side of the gully while he hiked to the other. It was a treacherous trail: he had to bushwhack his way through the trees, tiptoe across ledge traverses, and climb up fixed ropes. But he successfully pulled the webbing across and rigged the line. This is it, he thought.

On the way back, he stumbled, and a sharp stick pierced his palm. When he tried to pull it out, it snapped. He jerked out the last stub of the branch with his teeth. Blood gushed from his hand. He thought about where he was, thought about calling for help. He needed to stay calm. He slowly trekked back, bleeding the whole way.

After his friends bandaged his swollen hand, Seabrooke decided not to take any painkillers. “I wanted to make sure I could feel the pain, see how bad it was,” he says. His friends suggested going back down, but Seabrooke wasn’t ready to give up. He dismissed his injury as minor. “It’s a long way from the heart,” he told them. “I’ll be okay.”

An hour later, he tried walking the line. He was doing surprisingly well. He walked a little, and when he fell, he caught himself with his hands. When he looked down he saw that the blood had soaked the bandage, and was dripping through the line. “Needless to say,” Seabrooke says, “I was defeated.”

He couldn’t stop thinking about the Itus. He wanted to go back right away, but friends persuaded him to take some time to heal. For the next few weeks, Seabrooke trained on the ground, in parks, on other lines; he practiced walking that height, that length, and longer. In August 2014, he hosted the second annual highlining festival on the Chief. They rigged six lines in two gullies. He walked the Itus with the leash again, with a few falls. He knew he was too distracted to give it his full attention. He wanted a clean send with the leash—to walk across without a single catch. He returned to the line using better webbing, and finally got the finish he wanted. “It was glorious,” he says.

The day Seabrooke planned to free solo the Itus, there were highlines set up in both gullies on the Chief, but most of the highliners left for the other gully as Seabrooke got ready. They were too frightened to watch. Three close friends and two videographers with drone cameras stayed. Seabrooke started to grunt and pace. Everyone around him went quiet.

Seabrooke walked the line once with the harness on and the leash trailing behind, connected. As he walked, he imagined himself without the leash. His heart was racing.
He felt desire boiling inside of him. I can do this, he thought.

He stepped back onto the cliff, and untied himself from the line. Even though he was untethered, he decided to keep the harness on. He had a carabiner clipped to it, a last-ditch backup plan that gave him the determination to continue.

When he got on the line again, 290 meters off the ground with no safety cord, his body reacted immediately. Before he fully stood up, he collapsed. It was an overwhelming, instinctive reaction—evolution overriding and telling him, Don’t walk off the edge of the cliff. He breathed deeply, pulled himself up, and took a step. His body was shaking. He felt his nerves all the way down to his toes. He sat back on the line, gathered everything within himself, and let out a roar. “I screamed as loud as I could. And then I just stood up and started fighting for it.”

The first step was the hardest. Then, everything slowed down. He sunk his weight on the line. He grunted. He took a step. He took another. He smelled a fire from the woods, heard the drone buzzing around his head. He breathed. He did not think. He especially did not think about falling.

When he stepped off on the other end of the Itus, Seabrooke was alone. He laughed so hard he cried. He felt overwhelming joy and relief. It was a feeling unlike any other. “It’s one in a million,” he says. “It’s unreal.”

Maureen Kimble was sitting in her house in Peterborough, looking out at the lake, when her phone rang. “Hey Mama!” Seabrooke said. “I just broke the world record!” She froze. “You did what?” “Yeah, I just free soloed and broke the world record.”

Kimble quickly changed the subject. She told him that they’d just lost out on a condo they’d been interested in buying in Vancouver, and Seabrooke consoled her. She’d always been supportive about her son’s adventures until she started seeing the highlining photos online. “I was scared shitless,” she says, “and that was when he was wearing a tether.” She made it a point to never like any of his posts on social media. When Seabrooke called before a free solo, Kimble would say, “I don’t feel good about this.” She became bad for his mojo, so he switched to calling her after. That afternoon, she could no longer pretend to be okay with what he was doing. “It felt too real,” she says. “I just wanted it to go away.”

To an unknowing onlooker, the falls and catches in the first part of the two-minute world-record video look terrifying. For Seabrooke, it was a way to reset. Besides, he wanted the video to include him catching: “There’s no way it could have grabbed the media’s attention the way it did otherwise.” When Andy Lewis broke the first record, he caught the line three or four times, but the video edited out the falls, showing only the “amazing finale.” The Itus is nine meters longer than the line Lewis free soloed in 2011, and the video of Seabrooke’s walk quickly went viral—it’s been viewed almost 2 million times. (Seabrooke held the world record for a year. On August 24, 2016, German slackliner Friedi Kühne walked a 72-meter-long, 400-meter highline, setting the new free solo record.)

Kimble didn’t understand the magnitude of what her son had done until she watched the video. She finally clicked the like button. So proud of you, she wrote. The next day, she was alone at home when it hit her, what could have happened. “Right out of the blue,” she recalls, “I just started crying and crying and crying, and couldn’t stop.”

She is still haunted by her response to his phone call, even though Seabrooke hardly remembers it. “He was on top of the world—and I was just flat,” she says, her voice heavy. She will never encourage him to free solo, but if something ever happened, she says, she’d want him to know that she supports him “one hundred percent.”

From the balcony of her new apartment in North Vancouver, Kimble has a perfect view of the Lions, two snow-covered peaks with a 345-meter gap between them. Seabrooke has told her that he wants to walk across it. She looks out at the mountains and smiles uncertainly. “How can I not think about him all the time?”

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WORDS BY TIM STRUBY

ART BY SEB AGRESTI

VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

On the afternoon of April 26, 1986, 20-year-old Oghogho Ayo Agbonkpolo arrived at John F. Kennedy airport. He’d had a long trip. An hour drive from his home in Ibadan, Nigeria, to Lagos, then a connection in Abidjan, another connection in Dakar that he nearly missed, and finally the eight-hour flight to New York. He’d traveled the 5,253 miles not for a visit, but to start a new life. Ayo had come to play Division I basketball at Fordham University.

An excited Assistant Coach Buddy Mahar met Ayo at the airport. The two drove back to the Fordham Rose Hill Bronx campus, dropped Ayo’s bags in room 702 of the Walsh Hall dorm, and went to the diner across the street. While Ayo knew next to nothing about the Bronx or Fordham basketball, everyone on the Rams team had heard of Ayo.

“Our coaches had been warning us that some big African guy was coming over,” says Doug Bantam, who played on the men’s basketball team from ’86 to ’89. “They told us that this guy was going to take our spots, that we would have to work harder if we wanted to play, that he was great.” On a resurgent Fordham basketball team that had made it to the National Invitation Tournament five consecutive years, Ayo was to be the final piece of the puzzle to take them to “The Dance”—the NCAA Tournament.

As Buddy stared at Ayo at the diner, he couldn’t believe the team’s luck. A Jesuit priest in Nigeria stumbles upon a basketball game—who could make that up? And Ayo looked every bit as advertised: 6′ 9″ with shoulders as wide as a doorframe and a wingspan to match. Hell, maybe he could be the next Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon. It was no surprise Ayo had gotten a full athletic scholarship.

Yet there was something Buddy didn’t know. Something the Rams players, coaches, staff, and administrators didn’t know. Ayo wasn’t going to be a difference maker, the next Olajuwon. Why? Because Oghogho Ayo Agbonkpolo was the wrong man.

II.

Twenty years later, Ayo sits in a booth at the Cheesecake Factory at the Irvine Spectrum, California’s “premiere dining, shopping, and entertainment destination.” Dressed in a black skintight Lycra shirt and shorts with a clean-shaven scalp, he’s still in the immaculate shape he was the first day he set foot on campus. As he picks over his Cajon sirloin and plantains, he vividly recalls that afternoon. “I hoped I’d be alone in a room so I could lock the door and cry,” he mumbles. “I was so scared.”

Ayo was frightened because he had never imagined playing basketball abroad. Never pictured himself living in the United States. Back in the mid-’80s, there were no NBA African development programs. College programs didn’t have scouts combing the continent. Ayo was recruited by accident.

III.

“I’m not sure how I found the game,” says Father George McCauley, SJ. “I think someone must have told me about it.”

In 1964, the Jesuits founded the Pastoral Institute, a Catholic mission based in Ibadan, Nigeria. McCauley arrived in January 1986 for a six-month stay; his duties included performing weekly mass at an “out station” 30 minutes out of the city. Ayo was a parishioner. “I went to see him play and thought he had the moves,” explains the 75-year-old priest. With a background in poetry and music, McCauley wasn’t completely confident in his assessment skills, so he enlisted a pair of visiting Jesuits to join him courtside. When, according to McCauley, they gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, he reached out to the Fordham Athletic department and men’s basketball coach Tom Penders. “He said Ayo had tremendous ability but was raw,” recalls Penders. “Today it would have been illegal, because Father McCauley wasn’t a designated recruiter.” But the now-former coach welcomed the gamble. In the late ’70s, he’d signed Sudanese cousins Dud Tongal and Ed Bona, who led the Rams to a 1983 MAAC title. “They were my biggest recruits during my tenure at Fordham,” says Penders. “They turned the program around.” Plane ticket and four-year ride in hand, Ayo bid farewell to his mother, Arien Victoria, and seven sisters and headed to America.

That fall, during the first unofficial practices of the ’86–’87 season at the Lombardi Center, the Rams hoopsters finally met their heralded prospect in person. “The Dream” was not the term that came to mind. “He didn’t have a feel for the game,” explains Tom Parrotta (’84–’88), now an assistant coach at Fairfield University. “It was too fast and too physical for him. He shouldn’t have been playing D-I ball.” Others were less polite. “How long did it take to tell he couldn’t play?” says Pat Macarchuk, Ayo’s former JV teammate. “Until he touched the ball. In his sweats you’d think he was a project. Big. Great body. But then they’d throw him the ball and he’d have to run with it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, boy . . .’”

Athleticism wasn’t Ayo’s problem. When the team was given a fitness evaluation, he beat everyone with a 5:05 mile. Effort wasn’t an issue either. “He was a hard worker,” explains then–Assistant Coach Jack Armstrong, now a commentator for the Toronto Raptors. “But he was just a limited, limited player.”

Not simply a limited player. He was the wrong player. “We had a tape of him in office before he got there,” explains Armstrong. “He looked impressive with shot blocking and skills around the basket. But when I peeked my head into the Lombardi Center—we couldn’t be in the gym with players until October 15th—it didn’t look like same guy. And the players said the same thing. ‘Who is this kid?’”

He was a kid who had grown up in Ibadan playing soccer, not hoops. “We would play barefoot,” says Ayo. “In the streets, empty lots, yards, anywhere we could.” A kid who, until he turned 17 and shot up from 6’4” to 6’8”, had never even heard of the NBA or Michael Jordan. “I played basketball for only one year,” says Ayo. “I was getting paid 300 naira a month.”

Most schools wouldn’t have kept him. Within a week, basketball factories like UNLV and Cincinnati would have been running him off, badgering him, harassing him in practice, or making him feel left out. If that didn’t work, a coach would have brought him in the office, slammed door, sat him down and thrown him the NCAA book, and said, “Start circling schools, because you’re a pain in the ass and you don’t fit in.”

But none of the Fordham players made him feel unwanted. No coaches forced him to transfer or lobbied to have him shipped back to Ibadan to use the scholarship for another player. School officials honored his free ride. “Everyone recognized that Ayo was a good kid and a hard worker, so we said let’s bite the bullet and make sure he gets a degree,” Armstrong explains.

Nor did anyone call out the elephant in the room. “We talked about the ‘wrong man’ legend,” recalls Macarchuk. “But not with Ayo. I don’t think anyone asked, ‘Did they recruit your brother?’ ‘Was it someone else on the tape?’” And while Ayo was quiet and a bit of a loner, he was, despite the bizarre circumstances, well liked. “Ayo was such a nice kid,” says former Sports Information director Joe Favorito. “So everyone gave him a free pass on it.”

Off the court, Ayo gradually acclimated to college life. He went to dorm parties. Hit the New York City nightclubs. “We played Ping-Pong almost every day,” says former teammate Fred Herzog. “Ayo had a good serve and a mean return.” Mostly, he trained. “He was always playing in Lombardi Center, shooting by himself and lifting weights,” says former men’s basketball team manager Jeremy Joyce.

The dedication, however, didn’t produce results on the hardwood. Still, after two seasons on the JV squad—which was basically a club team—the team’s head coach, Nick Macarchuk, named Ayo to the varsity team for his senior year. It was more symbolic than substantive, but being a fixture on the bench didn’t sit well with Ayo. “A couple times he talked to me,” recalls Macarchuk. “He asked why he wasn’t playing and what he could do to play. There’s never a time a player who doesn’t play doesn’t question if they’ve done something wrong, and I respected that. But he thought he was better than he was. He wasn’t skilled. And we were having a very competitive year.”

Competitive enough to win the Patriot League with an 11–1 conference record (25–8 overall) and earn a chance to make the NCAA Tournament with a play-in game against St. Francis. (Fordham lost 70–64.) Some of those games, inevitably, were blowouts, and when the Rams were running up the score in front of their fans at Rose Hill something special started happening. The home crowd would begin to chant, “Ay-o! Ay-o!” See, Ayo had turned into a fan favorite. A hero of sorts. He was becoming the Rams’ own Rudy.

On the night of February 2, 1991, at Rose Hill, the 2,004 fans began that very chant. With the Rams piling it on against Adelphi University, Coach Macarchuk called Ayo’s name. The crowd leapt to their feet. With 1:57 remaining and the Rams up 87–52, Ayo made his first basket—two points of only five he’d score in his entire Fordham varsity career. They were meaningless points in a game already over, but from the reaction of the crowd you would have thought he’d just sunk the buzzer-beating game-winner in the NCAA Finals.

IV.

Finished with lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, Ayo heads for the Irvine Equinox to visit Bill, his former gym manager. After graduating from Fordham with a BA in Economics, he took a string of temporary gigs with UPS, Staples, and as a bouncer at Manhattan nightclubs like Tattoo and Coup. He tried acting and wound up in an accredited role in the film Mean Girls (he played an “African Warrior”). Eventually he got married, had a son, and moved to southern California, where he settled into a career as a certified personal trainer. A starkly different path than what he would have taken in Ibadan. “Life is so strange,” says Ayo.

When reflecting on his Fordham days, he is more bitter than thankful. Despite every account to the contrary, Ayo insists he had the skills—that coaches simply didn’t believe in him. “I didn’t get fair treatment playing basketball,” he says. “I would have turned that program around.” And in that instant another piece of the puzzle falls into place. The true final piece. Ayo never knew—or never wanted to know—he was the wrong man.

A causal stroll through the gym finds Bill and Ayo at the facility’s regulation-size outdoor basketball court. The two men step through glass doors and into the warm November sun.

“Nice, huh?” asks Bill, tossing Ayo a basketball.

“Oh my God,” says Ayo. “Amazing. If I worked here I might never want to leave.”

In his long fingers, the basketball almost disappears. Instinctually, Ayo walks to the foul line, turns, takes three quick steps, and leaps into the air for a dunk. But there is no sweet-sounding swish. Instead the ball clangs against the front of the rim and falls to the ground with a soft thud.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.

This story originally appeared in Victory Journal #13.

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY JOSEPH SWIDE
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

Alex Moiseyev is built like a 1970s NFL lineman. Standing more than six feet tall, his broad frame looms over a table at the 2017 ACF 11-Man National Tournament, an imposing wall of dominance. “Checkers is my life,” he later says, his tone verging on a threat. The game has become his obsession. That’s why he’s here, inside the Honeysuckle Inn and Conference Center in Branson, Missouri, located on the Shepherd of the Hills Expressway next to Ricky Bobby’s Pit Stop.

Moiseyev, a 57-year-old computer programmer from Columbus, Ohio, is the current grandmaster of checkers in the United States, and he wants a piece of the $20,000 prize purse, the largest for any checkers tournament in recent history. There are stories about Moiseyev, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Like the time before a world title match against longtime rival Ron “Suki” King, a two-time Barbados Sportsman of the Year. The event’s sponsor took them to dinner at Cracker Barrel. Moiseyev supposedly ordered two dinners and ate each meal separately at opposite sides of the table, as though playing both sides of a checkers opening. Moiseyev beat King in three straight World Title Matches in 2003, 2005, and 2009.

To watch Moiseyev move around a checkers space is to watch a titan in his or her respective space of competition. He’s rarely seen socializing. His interactions consist of dissecting the process and outcome of a game or examining a theoretical checker position. For the next few days, the conference room inside the motel has transformed into tournament headquarters. Competition rooms settle into a hush as games get underway. In the midst of a three-hour round, Moiseyev twitches one foot against the other, the type of minor distraction that can have a significant effect. A quiet conversation between other players in the room is enough to disrupt a player on the cusp of a strategic move. At one point during the tournament, World Champion Michele Borghetti of Italy hurled an apple against a wall and stormed out in a fury after losing a game due in part to what he claimed was an unprofessional level of chatter in the room. Yet no one made the slightest protest about Moiseyev’s foot tic, even though it rang like a bell in the otherwise dead silence.

There are three types of checkers played at the tournament level. “Go As You Please” is the traditional, simple version that most any casual player would recognize. But with only a small number of potential openings, “Go As You Please” matches can be predictable and players can memorize the lines of their specific games and their opponent’s counter moves.

“Three-Move” is a style that requires players to draw cards that dictate the first three moves of the game. This process limits a player’s ability to memorize lines and expands the number of potential openings to play. For “11-Man Ballot,” the style used at the tournament in Branson, players draw cards that dictate an opening move from each side; they also remove a piece from each side, expanding the number of potential openings to play to several thousand. This makes it virtually impossible to memorize lines, requiring players to mentally assess the board and rely on their talent and experience to map out new lines for each game. This type of checkers is particularly grueling and often referred to as the purest form of the game.

Moiseyev won the Three-Move world title in 2003 and held it for a decade before losing in 2013 to Borghetti in Livorno, Italy. Moiseyev had a heart attack later that same year; since then, the talk among a few players in Branson is that Moiseyev hasn’t been quite the invincible machine that he once was.

A career in checkers is intrinsically tied to one’s loss of ability when the mind starts to slip in advanced age. A player might miss an opening or fall into a trap that he would have easily spotted in his prime. None of this seems lost on Moiseyev, who can see the writing on the wall. One night after a long day of competition, he finds himself in a vulnerable position that many past champions experience once they reach the summit of their field and begin descending.

The young Italians are coming for him. At the time of our interview, he sat in a disappointing fourth, trailing Borghetti, fellow Italian Sergio Scarpetta, and South African grandmaster Lubabalo Kondlo. Borghetti has already taken his world title in Three-Move, while Scarpetta took King’s world title in “Go As You Please” in 2015, leaving Moiseyev’s world title in 11-Man Ballot as the last one not yet in their Italian grasp. The winner in Branson will earn the right to challenge Moiseyev for that final title. And while others in Branson expect Moiseyev’s reign as world champion to end as soon as the next world title match, he clings to hope. As we talk, Moiseyev notes his rage approaching “the crazy zone, 60 and more.” He references former Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who retired from competition at age 42. “I am not at that level yet. I can still say something in checkers.” Then he walked into the night to find a liquor store.

Not many young people are maintaining the sport’s livelihood. While the Internet and the proliferation of handheld computing and gaming haven’t done the popularity of checkers many favors, the sport has continued to take hits since the invention of television. When people in the community talk about checkers as a dying sport, they often mean that a number of players have literally died. The game is mostly popular in places, times, and cultures where there isn’t much to do. Of the remaining American players, many are from rural areas of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Younger players seem to come from countries outside the United States.

Lubabalo Kondlo left his home in South Africa’s New Brighton township on a Friday afternoon with little more than the clothes on his back. Kondlo, Africa’s first checkers grandmaster, is from one of the country’s poorest areas, a largely agrarian region that holds the distinction as the birthplace of Nelson Mandela and Stephen Biko. Kondlo is considered one of the five best checkers players on the planet. He has competed for world titles and was even the subject of a documentary, King Me.

Kondlo spent the next four days on a multi-continental voyage to make it to the tournament in Branson. After a 10-hour overnight bus ride from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, followed by a 10-hour flight to Germany, a 10-hour flight to Colorado and then nearly a two-hour flight to Springfield-Branson National Airport, his final leg of the journey was a 55-mile ride down U.S. Route 65 South with Jeannie McDaniel, a 69-year-old ultra-marathoner and former Democratic politician in Oklahoma who co-sponsors the tournament with her husband. They pass endless billboards for Cracker Barrel, Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, and various Chinese acrobat troupes before arriving at the Honeysuckle Inn & Conference Center at midnight. The next morning, Kondlo begins four long, grueling days of competition against the best checkers players in the world.

A South African township may seem like another planet from places like Missouri, Oklahoma, or Southern Ohio, and in many ways it is. Nonetheless, the checkers community has taken in Kondlo. “I thank God for this talent,” he says while sitting in a room with American Checker Federation president Alan Millhone, sipping Coca-Cola from a red Solo cup.

To spend a week at a checkers tournament is to enter a uniquely diverse and self-sustaining universe. The tournament begins at 8:30 a.m. and consists of three three-hour rounds each day. Few, if any, other pursuits would have such a collection of 39 people—elderly Appalachians, Southerners, young Italians, Bajans, Amish, an Iraq War veteran, a chemist, a Russian immigrant, an Israeli immigrant—competing against one another in a motel in Missouri. And few things exemplify that diversity like the friendship between Kondlo and Millhone, a bolo tie wearing Army veteran and grandfather from Belpre, Ohio, who Kondlo refers to as “Old Man” (Millhone, for his part, often calls Kondlo “my friend Lubabalo Kondlo” as though it’s one full name).

The two spend most of their breaks together in Millhone’s room, where Kondlo phones family in South Africa. They dine together at nearby chain restaurants. “Old Man Millhone” sponsored Kondlo’s first trip to the U.S. in 2007 to play in a national tournament in Las Vegas that Kondlo would go on to win. Since then, Millhone has traveled to Italy to officiate a world title match in which Kondlo competed. When Kondlo comes to the U.S., he occasionally travels home with Millhone to Belpre and spends several days with him.

“I really want to win this tournament, man. For the people back home,” says Kondlo as we walk across the street for dinner at Golden Corral. Currently in third place in the Masters division, trailing only the Italians, Kondlo stands to win about $1300 of the $20,000 purse, certainly not an insignificant amount in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

As Kondlo enjoys his portions of the $14 buffet of ribs, green peas and mushrooms, he talks about the Bible and shows pictures of his wife and children on his cell phone. He wants to bring them to the U.S. one day to share the experience. He asks me to take his picture so he can show friends and family back home what America looks like. A handwritten name tag that reads “Lubabalo Kondlo, Grandmaster” is on his shirt as he stands proudly underneath neon lights outside of the Golden Corral.

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WORDS BY PETER FISHER AND SAM HOCKLEY-SMITH
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FISHER
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

Every year, intrepid mountain bikers head to the evocatively named Virgin, Utah, which is right on the edge of Zion National Park, to compete in the Red Bull Rampage, a beyond-extreme race that features riders navigating impossible terrain—sheer drops, craggy cliff sides, hidden mud pits—and pulling off the kinds of tricks that seem to defy gravity to such a degree that they look unreal. Can bikes really move like that? Can people? Here’s the 2025 Red Bull Rampage through the lens (and words) of photographer Peter Fisher, who was game to clamber, stumble, climb, and generally get right in the mix, about his experience making pictures for the event.

Peter Fisher: “It was so extreme. The stuff online did an okay job conveying how extreme it was, but it wasn’t until I was actually standing there watching this go down, looking at all these trails and ridges, that I was like, ‘Holy shit, someone’s going to launch off that.’ Even to get there, you have to take this shuttle up these dirt roads that are bouncing you everywhere, and then you have to hike in. It’s not close to the parking lot. It’s not close to anything.”

“See that wooden structure up top? That’s where the riders started. They choose a side to go off, choose which ridge line to take. It’s anyone’s game. There might be two or three different routes directly off the structure, but when they hit the next ridge it splits off again into like three other routes they could take. Some are from years prior, or are built on previous years’ routes. Most of them are brand new. They’ve been working on them for weeks. The diggers have been perfecting them right up to the minute that the riders shoot down. During the trial, the riders are figuring out what their route could be, how it’s doing, where it’s going to go. It’s pretty planned because it is so extreme and one wrong move could mean you’re horribly injured or even worse.

I got to go up to the very top of the wooden structure and it is absolutely insane. It’s just a sheer cliff face on the other side. It was risky just walking up there with my camera gear, let alone a bike. But for me, it was the speed. The speed at which they were coming own, the amount of control they had over these bikes…it was incredible.”

“I met another photographer and for maybe the first half of the day I followed him around, and he was showing me, like, ‘Okay, see this mark? See these two pebbles over here, how they are arranged on the side of this ramp or platform? Don’t touch those. This is a line. It’s to line up the wheel when they fly off this ramp.’ You’re just figuring out this language. I took down notes and watched where these riders’ different lines were so I could make a map and stand where their line was going. Sometimes, a rider’s line would be on a ridge and then I’d get word that the next person who was really great was going to try to backflip on this other ridge, so you’re going to have to haul ass and map the route out.”

“There are some periods of time where there’s a lot going on, and then other times, I was just baking in the sun waiting for something to happen. That can be because the winds change, and if the wind is too much, they pause all the races. Sometimes they’ll pause for a few hours because the stakes are so high. You don’t want to go down when there’s gusts or it’s going to blow you off course, and when you’re in the air, you just become a huge sail.”

“I tried to narrow it down. Like, what riders were doing the craziest moves. Who was really laying it all out there? And then, where was that happening? If there were two really good riders, were they picking the same lines? Where did they converge? I did that so I could minimize the amount of movement I needed to make, but could still get different angles. I wound up in this gully and the riders would just fly right over me, but I really had to listen, otherwise they’d just shoot over me in half a second and I wouldn’t hear anything. It took me awhile to get my ear right.”

“I almost got taken out by a rider. I felt like such a fucking idiot. He finished great, but it was one of those moments where I was pushing myself to get closer, because I wasn’t getting the photos I wanted. After a few days, I’d worked up the courage. I’m like, ‘Okay, I know where everyone’s routes are. I feel like I can see the signs. I had this one guy fly through the air while I was shooting through a longer lens, and I made eye contact with him through my camera, and I was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s coming right for me.’ So I took one step to my right, and sure enough, he lands right where I just was and barrels on. It was close. Right after that, a referee came up and was like, ‘We’re gonna need you to move from this area,” and I was like, ‘Buddy you don’t have to tell me.’”

“The riders have these bike sherpas who carry their bikes up the mountain. They’re probably friends with the riders or diggers who build the routes. They just hike these things up for them, so the riders can save their energy, because it takes so much to get the bikes up there that if the riders were to do it themselves they wouldn’t have the energy to be able to do these lines.”

“I enjoyed watching the riders practice. It felt like the pressure was off and they were trying things out, workshopping. Everyone would get together, the riders, the diggers, and figure out what was working and what was not. It was cool to watch the gears turning in their heads. You don’t realize how much and collaboration goes into one of these routes. The diggers are there digging out the trails and pathways, and they’re getting immediate feedback from the riders, who’re saying things like, ‘I need this higher,’ or ‘This is actually starting to crumble. I need you to put some water on it.’ They’re rebuilding things. They’re making things larger. They’re widening things, shoring things up. Diggers were out there for hours flattening out lines, baking in the sun, packing them down, so that eventually it can be rideable. And then they go up and do it all over again. The rider’s life is kind of in the digger’s hands, I think. There’s a lot of pressure to make a safe route for the riders. It’s probably more stressful than the actual ride. If a rider wiped out, the diggers took it hard. They were usually the first on the scene. There was even an award given out to the diggers based on how inventive the line was, how beautiful or well-constructed it was, or how original it was. The diggers are the unsung heroes of the entire event, so it was cool to see them be put on a pedestal. They’re usually riders themselves, and some of the riders are former diggers.”

“At one point during the practice period, I noticed this guy just leaving it all on the table. It was evening, right after the sun went down, and a lot of people had left. Riders are practicing until the very last moment, the very last bit of light. This guy was just pushing himself, and he was performing some tricks that still, physics-wise, don’t make sense to me. Sometimes I wanted to put the camera down and just watch this happen. It was like my brain couldn’t even comprehend what they were doing.”

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WORDS BY MICHAEL VENUTOLO-MANTOVANI
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEOFFREY KNOTT
VICTORYJOURNAL.COM

The tire changer is perched atop the short concrete wall, knees bent, ready to spring into action once the battle-scarred race car pulls into the pit. They give the impact gun’s trigger a few pulls, eliciting a series of the zip-cracks synonymous with stock car racing. Perhaps this is a way of shaking some kind of race gunk out of the gun. Perhaps it’s just force of habit, passed down through generations from the moonshine-running outlaws who invented the sport.

Thirty-nine race cars rumble down pit road, their 358-cubic-inch small blocks shaking the very ground beneath them as 47,000 fans rise to their feet. They have packed into Darlington Raceway’s grandstand on a sweltering late-August South Carolina night for The Southern 500, one of NASCAR’s crown jewel races, and are all angling for a better view of one of stock car racing’s most exciting moments: the pit stop.

Thirty-nine pit crews spring into action as their drivers pilot their cars into the designated pit stalls, where each car will get four brand-new Goodyear tires slapped onto their race-worn hubs, have a full tank of Sunoco fuel dumped into the tank, and undergo the track- and sway-bar adjustments necessary to hug the banked curves of Darlington’s famously brutal track, a track so violent and unforgiving that it’s referred to as “Too Tough To Tame.”

When the car comes to a screeching halt, the pit crew leaps over the wall as brake dust billows out of the used-up wheels. The crew—one front tire changer, one rear, two tire carriers, a jackman, and a fuelman—work their choreographed routine, dancing around each other with a preternatural sense of the exact location of their teammates. The tire changer sprints toward the car’s far side, staying as tight to the bumper as possible. As the jackman slides his massive steel carjack beneath the car, hoisting the 3,500-pound race car’s right side off the ground, the tire changer slides to their knees on well-worn knee pads and hits each of the rear right tire’s five lugs.

Zip Zip Zip Zip Zip

The tire carrier pulls the melted tire from the car and rolls it aside for another crew member to handle. A fresh wheel wrapped in brand new Goodyear rubber is lifted onto the car’s hub. The tire changer smashes the little button on their impact gun, changing its setting immediately from loosen to tighten.

Zip Zip Zip Zip Zip

The five lugs fasten the wheel safely to the car, the jackman frees the tension on the jack, the car thuds to the ground, and the pit crew sprints to do the exact same to the car’s left side. The jackman again lets out his jack and the car slams into the asphalt.

“Go go go go go!” the crew chief tells his driver via radio the instant the car hits pavement. The wheels spin as the driver smashes the gas pedal into the floor, coaxing the 800 or so horses beneath his hood back to life. Four fresh tires, a full tank of fuel, and precise race adjustments—all in under 15 seconds.

The pit crew climbs back over the wall and remove their helmets to reveal heads covered in fire-retardant head sleeves. Most of these men are large-to-enormous in stature. Many are former major-college football players. Tossing tires, massive car jacks, and fuel tanks around like this requires raw strength and plenty of athletic ability.

As they climb back over the wall and congregate behind their team’s pit box, and the helmets and head sleeves come off, it becomes apparent that the tire changer isn’t exactly like the rest of her team. The tire changer is Brehanna Daniels, the first African-American female tire changer in NASCAR history.

II.

Mooresville, North Carolina is the center of the American stock car racing universe. The governing body of NASCAR is headquartered 30 miles down Route 77 in a gleaming high rise in uptown Charlotte. But here in Mooresville, every gravel parking lot finds at least one race car hauler and an in-process chassis build can be seen through almost every open garage door. It is here that the rubber tracks of a million burnouts dot every country byway, and discarded tires pile up beside home carports where stock car racing lives.

It seems like every car on Mooresville’s winding country roads is a hot rod, with road-rumbling exhaust pipes and asphalt-grabbing, low-profile tires that can push these American-bred street machines down a quarter-mile race strip in sub-14 seconds. Nearly every truck is lifted, sitting high on 33s or 34s at minimum, each of their pitch-black rear windows adorned with a sticker denoting the number of the modified or street stock that their owner races every Saturday night at local tracks throughout the Southeast.

A light rain falls as Daniels pulls into the parking lot of Mooresville’s Xcalibur Pit School in her bone stock Jeep Wrangler, an outlier in this lot full of those Mooresville hot rods and those Mooresville trucks. She apologizes for being late. Daniels doesn’t have a full-time job with a race team, so she has to work nights at a Charlotte-area Top Golf driving range to help with her expenses.

She heads into the no-frills facility where she trains every day and waits for the weekly call that tells her which race, and with which team, she’ll be working that weekend. NASCAR’s underfunded teams can’t afford to carry full-time crews on the payroll and use outfits like Xcalibur as a sort of weekly pit crew staffing agency. Daniels has no way of knowing where her next race will be.

Xcalibur is a converted garage that hosts a simulated pit stall. Tires, perhaps a hundred of them, are piled behind a 20-foot-long, two-foot-high concrete wall, and there are buckets everywhere filled with thousands of tiny yellow lug nuts. Every few minutes, a stock car rumbles to life just outside the garage’s rolled-up door and pulls into the fake stall for a practice stop. A team of crew hopefuls will change this car’s tires and mimic a tank refill dozens of times over the course of the afternoon.

III.

Daniels was a scholarship basketball player at Norfolk State, a historically black college in coastal Virginia, when she was recruited by NASCAR’s Drive For Diversity, a program aimed at bringing more women and people of color into the sport’s ranks. Around four years ago, the program began hosting football-style combines at HBCUs around the country. The goal was to identify athletes who didn’t have a professional future in their chosen sport but still wanted to compete—even if they didn’t know the first thing about racing.

“I had heard of NASCAR,” Daniels says. “I had no idea what it entailed. But I knew I didn’t want my athletic career to be over.”

Tiffany Sykes, then Norfolk State’s basketball announcer, convinced Daniels to attend Norfolk State’s combine in May of 2016 by showing her a YouTube video of a NASCAR pit stop. Daniels was amazed at the speed and athleticism of the pit crew and decided to attend the combine, where she performed well enough to be invited to the national combine, which landed her at a spot at NASCAR’s pit school training program at Concord, North Carolina-based Rev Racing.

At Rev, Daniels spent the next six months working under the tutelage of veteran crew chief Phil Horton, learning the intricacies of a pit stop. She watched films of tire changers snaking around one another, massive tires tucked beneath their arms. She learned the rules and regulations of a pit stop, how many members of the crew were allowed over the wall, and the danger and threat of penalty of letting a loose tire roll away from your reach. She learned that “being tight” meant the car had too much grip and not enough speed and, conversely, that “being loose” meant the car had good speed but little control. She learned how tire pressure might affect these issues. She learned how to use an impact gun.

Daniels’s body hurt and her brain was exhausted. She iced her hands, which were sore from using the impact gun and tugging steel wheels off of race cars. It reminded her of her early days as a college basketball player.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but I don’t know if I expected it to be that hard,” she says.

After six months of training, Daniels landed with Xcalibur. Shortly thereafter, she made history. At the 2017 spring race at Delaware’s Dover International Speedway, Daniels became the first African-American woman to pit in a NASCAR racing series.

IV.

It’s late in Darlington, almost midnight. The front end of Hurricane Dorian delayed the Southern 500’s 6PM start by nearly four hours and the race is barely a quarter finished. But the cars roar on and no one has gone home.

Brehanna Daniels and her pit crew are huddled near the back end of pit road, milling around after a recent pit stop. They’re working with Rick Ware Racing’s 54 car, driven this night by young wheelman Garrett Smithley. It’s Smithley’s first Southern 500 and little is expected of him and the 54 team. It rarely ever is of these also-ran teams known as “lappers,” a pejorative derived from these cars’ inability to stay on the lead lap. For a lapper, simply finishing a race is a small victory.

On lap 67, the 54 car gets loose and spins across the asphalt. Smithley corrects before hitting the wall or any other cars, and the yellow flag waves as massive amber lights flash all around the track, letting the drivers know that the race is under caution. The pace car, a bright red Chevrolet Camaro, pulls off pit road and the 39 race cars file in behind it on the track.

Smithley’s crew rushes to gear up for a coming pit. As the cars turn one very slow lap around Darlington’s angry track, edging closer to turn four, closer to the entry of pit road, the crews tighten up.

Bumper to bumper, the cars exit turn four and make a hard left, rumbling down pit road, their bright paint schemes blending in to one giant brushstroke of racing greens, impact reds, and high-octane yellows. Garrett Smithley’s team await as nearly all the cars breeze by ahead of him.

The 54 car inches closer to its pit stall, and the crew members’ stances tense as they take their places atop the low pit wall. Jacks and fuel cans are heaved on massive shoulders. Brehanna Daniels grips her trusted impact gun and coils her body tight, ready for the dance she’s practiced a million times before.

This story originally appeared in Victory Journal #17.

Subscribe now and receive a couple Victory stories a month, straight to your inbox. We’d love your paid subscription support if you’re able. It helps us keep doing what we’re doing. In the meantime, look out for more great digital content, and we’ve still got copies of back issues, as well as subscriptions available. There’s never been a better time to enter into the world of Victory Journal. There’s a lot to discover.