#I felt like I made it too vague calling Jim competent

[wastedwastelandme]

Given how hilariously popular this post has gotten, I feel like I should make this addendum to it in terms of “competency” on the crew and how it applies to them. The way I see it, nearly every member has a very specific skill/area that they are adept at handling with little else outside of that.

Jim’s area is of course that they are hands down the best fighter on and off the ship... and kind of not caring about anything else. They only give off the aura of being better at handling and thinking of things than the others because they’re always next to Oluwande, who gives off enough reasonable energy for two people.

Oluwande’s area is that he is the one with common sense, a crowning achievement amongst this crew. At basically all times if you want an opinion that reasonable people would have, he is the one to go to.

Frenchie has his music skills of course, but might be dismissed skill-wise until he’s dealing with high society. He thrives in this environment, knowing just what to say and do to con all those uppity rich folks out of every cent they have. If you need a man for a scheme, this is your guy.

Roach has the double billing of ship’s cook and doctor. It is inconclusive how adept he is at either job (”knives are knives, meat’s meat”) but the crew isn’t dead and he worked with an order of a 40-orange glaze, so he gets a pass.

Lucius has probably the most extensive skillset out of the whole crew, his literacy combined with his pickpocket experience and enough street smarts to get out of both work and being killed by Jim twice. There are also times where he gets to share the common sense badge with Olu and can give just the right advice for the moment, though he oscillates between being able to quickly think his way out of situations and having thoughts overrun by panic, so your mileage may vary.

Buttons is the ship guy. He can tell you anything you need to know to keep the ship sailing smoothly and the crew occupied. He also can talk to seagulls and is probably a witch, which would actually make his behaviour seem more reasonable than the rest, so good for him.

Wee John and Black Pete fall into the category of crew ‘generally’ without specific skillsets, but pretty much can pick up and do any job needed on the ship with no visible deficiency (though I would be willing to count whittling for Black Pete and to put Wee John in my noted crewmembers who have sewing experience list with Frenchie and Roach). The Swede would fall into this category except that he busted out his excellent singing voice out of nowhere, so he gets to notch that into his skill column.

All of this is to say, basically each member gets to be competent at at least one thing, and this does not invalidate the fact that they are all still equally dumb as hell <3 

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 13: Star Trek Beyond

Some attempted thoughts on Star Trek Beyond.

So first it was bad lol. It is the worst. I thought maybe it would be less the worst than I had previously thought but it really, really is just irredeemably bad.

Trying to keep up with what was actually happening and talk in the group chat was too difficult and I now feel very exhausted lol. And I’m not even sure what I watched.

I liked Jaylah a lot, including her back story, characterization, “house,” traps, and cool mirror tricks.

I also like Kirk in that emergency uniform with the jacket unzipped.

That’s it! That’s all I liked.

In the past I’ve also said I liked the Spock and Bones parts but I honestly wasn’t a fan of them either this time around!

None of the characters felt IC and none of the relationships felt true or were compelling. Which is particularly egregious given that the alleged theme was strength in unity.

The movie was especially lacking in K/S content or even K & S interaction, which obviously didn’t please me. And it’s definitely the worst Kirk characterization I’ve ever seen. There’s no excuse for that either because it’s halfway through the 5YM, which means he should be pretty close to TOS Kirk--yes, he has a different set of experiences, so there’s going to be some variation, but there’s comparatively less excuse for a radically different characterization than in STXI and STID. They should have had Shatner read the script and make notes lol because whatever else you might say about him he KNOWS Captain Kirk.

Like, he (Kirk) lacked humor and charm and, often, confidence. He had moments when he was very smart and moments when he had a commanding presence. But he had just as many moments when he was whiny or bored and his Captain’s log??? I deserve financial compensation for every time I’ve listened to that. Bored of space?? No, this man is bored when he’s stuck on Earth. He stagnates in desk jobs. He is an adventurer and explorer before he’s ANYTHING else; if you don’t get that, you don’t need to be writing Star Trek.

Also, as I have frequently complained, I’m tired of him having no internal conflict or emotional complexity past his father issues. First reboot movie: dealing with his dead father’s memory and his step-father’s abuse. Fine, that makes sense for how they set up the AU. Second reboot movie: entirely motivated by the need for Manly Vengeance upon the person who killed his father figure. And for this redundant story line (in many sense) we had to lose Pike? Third reboot movie: you’d think he’d finally be ready to move on to other conflicts but actually no this time he’s sad about his birthday and having a longer life span than his...you guessed it!! father!! Yet again.

What else has ever motivated him? Legitimate question.

The destruction of the Enterprise was truly horrific. Long, boring, unwarranted, and without any emotional punch. As if it were just any ship! No, she’s a character in her own right and she’s not to be sacrificed like that but please tell me again how Simon Pegg is a true fan who brought the franchise back to its roots?

B said he did like that they split up the crew into unusual units but I have mixed feelings about it. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think they did a lot that was interesting with any of those separated units. Uhura and Sulu are a cool pair (but this would have been a good opportunity to include Sulu’s semi-canonical crush on Uhura but whatever... a different rant) and they almost did some interesting stuff with them. There were glimmers of a caper in that story line and times when I could tell they were straining especially hard to make Uhura, their Sole Female Main--now that they cut out Rand, Chapel, and even Carol Marcus--into something Feminist and Interesting. But it didn’t quite gel for me. Like, Uhura would be having almost interesting dialogue with the villain and holding her own...and then she loses track of her colleague and has to watch that person die, thus undercutting everything she just said about unity and seeming to prove the villain’s point. Is she competent or not?

Bones and Spock are a pair I care about and like but again I think their canonical relationship in TOS is more interesting than STB showed. I personally read them as like...reluctant best friends who originally just had one person in common, and then realized they also like each other too, but they’ll never really say it. They understand each other but pretend not to. They have fun with the barbs they throw at each other. They both deeply love Jim but in different ways. They enjoy their intellectual debates. (That’s one thing that was definitely missing from them here! The intellectual debates!) So again, there was something there but not enough.

And Kirk and Chekov just happened to land near each other; nothing was done with that relationship per se. They really aren’t people who have much of a relationship in TOS so there’s not a lot to work off of but then on the other hand there IS an opportunity to create something new. Maybe I’m being too harsh and too vague but it just didn’t gel for me. The only specific K and C moment I remember was that supremely un-funny joke about Kirk’s aim as he sets off the “wery large bomb.”

But like there are possibilities.. they’re both pretty horny and Chekov is a whiz kid and Kirk is also very smart and has always been smart... Like in other words people Chekov’s age don’t end up on the bridge crew, in either ‘verse, without the Captain’s say, so even though he’s TOS!Spock’s and AOS!Scotty’s protege, Kirk is important to his life. Something with that maybe??

I’m upset that Spock’s individual story line was about whether or not he should go off and make baby Vulcans because, again as I have complained many times before, that was a conflict he faced and resolved in ten minutes two movies ago, and it doesn’t make sense to me for him to bring it up again now just because the Ambassador is dead. Like... the Ambassador told him to stay in Starfleet!! “Ah, yes, I will honor him by doing precisely the opposite of what he wanted me to do.”

Also--if they had made his motivation different or gone into it more, I would have been more into it. Make it about New Vulcan! Say there’s news from New Vulcan that it’s not doing well. Or what if T’Pring got in contact with him? Or what if we used this as an excuse to bring in Sarek?

This is part of a larger point for me which is that STXI set up a really cool AU and STID tried to do something with it--a little hit or miss, but it tried--and instead of pushing even more at the AU and developing it more and doing more with it... STB just ignored it! Was that part of what Paramount was warning about with making it “not too Star Trek-y?” Was it SUPPOSED to be a movie you could watch without having seen the last two? If so they did succeed but like.. .why? They made the supremely ballsy move of blowing up a founding Federation planet two movies ago and now they’ve just forgotten about that and all the reverberations that would necessarily have?

But of course we got a call back to Kirk being a Beastie Boys fan so.... Guess it was Deep all along.

We all three agreed that the core story of this film was potentially interesting but could have been done as a 50-some minute episode of a TV series rather than a whole-ass 2 hour movie. First off, cutting or cutting down the action sequences would have shaved off half an hour easily.

I’m frustrated in large part because there are certain things that are interesting here. I do like the concept of the crew being pulled on to an alien planet by a ship of former Federation crew, from the early days of the Federation/deep space flight, who were presumed missing but are somehow still alive because they have turned into aliens/used alien tech to prolong life, and who have also captured other aliens, like Jaylah, for the main crew to interact with. All of that was cool.

I would even be okay with these old Federation crew being villains but I don’t think that’s necessary or even the most interesting take.

But...first of all, as my mom pointed out, Krall was basically Nero in his illogical motivations: feeling aggrieved because someone who couldn’t help him didn’t help him and then just maniacally wanting revenge. It made more sense to me with Nero in a way. Maybe that was because he was better characterized, maybe it was because his anger was more personal (the loss of his wife), maybe--probably--it was because he was angry at Spock and Spock had actually promised to help, so there was some kernel of logic in his sense of betrayal, even if it was out of proportion etc. Also, Nero’s mania was portrayed as mania--we were all supposed to recognize that the strength of his emotion was warranted but his logic was deeply flawed. I think we were supposed to think Krall had some kinda... real criticism of the Federation, but in fact he doesn’t! He’s wrong! So like if he’d been angry with the Federation for abandoning him but the narrative and the other characters explicitly recognize that he’s wrong--the Federation tried but he was just doing something very dangerous and he recognized that danger on signing on--that might have been more palatable to me.

I’m not sure I’m making sense here entirely or explaining myself as well as I could.

I just don’t entirely get Krall’s beef with the Federation. I don’t get that whole “being a soldier and having conflict makes you strong and having people you can rely on and connections and community makes you weak.” That seems pretty obviously false. It also doesn’t really seem, not that I’m an expert, but particularly in line with military ethos either.

BUT the idea that he had a life that was comfortable to him as a soldier and then the Federation comes in and forms Starfleet and says, actually, we’re going to pull back on the soldiering and up the diplomacy and the exploration and the science--yeah, I could see that. I DO think Starfleet is military but even if you must insist it’s not, it’s clearly based on and formed from the military, and it has certain military functions. So obviously the first people to join or be folded into Starfleet probably were more explicitly military.

So he’s one of those people. Now he’s supposed to be a scientist and a diplomat and an explorer and he doesn’t like that. He’s given this very prestigious and interesting mission and jumps at it. Starfleet warns him, you might go beyond where we can reach, we might not be able to help you. That’s fine. But then when his ship is stranded and he is lost, he gets angry--maybe somewhat irrationally, but understandably--why?? Why did the Federation do this to him? What was even the point? When he put himself in danger before, at least he knew why. But just flying around space for the hell of it, and this is the cost? So that’s what creates his anger.

I thin this could be tied into Kirk’s diplomacy at the beginning--if the scene were written to not be a comedy bit where Kirk looks like an incompetent buffoon and is completely disrespectful the whole time. He’s good at this job and we should say it. But we could emphasize that this IS a diplomatic mission often, just as often as it’s a military or scientific mission. Maybe we could include other bits of their missions, too, to play up the variety of things they do and roles they play.

Another thing I think could be interesting, going back to my point about Spock, Vulcan, and using the first two movies and expanding on the world building... what if Spock wanted to leave Starfleet for better, more well-defined reasons, and we used that? Paralleled the two? Connected the two?

Because I think Vulcan in the AOS verse is very interesting and the movies didn’t do nearly enough with it. First, we have the Romulans showing up way earlier, at least visibly: in TOS, no one knew what they looked like or their connection to Vulcans until Spock is in his late 30s. In AOS, it happens not long after he’s born. So he’s growing up probably with more anti-Vulcan racism floating around the Federation. THEN Vulcan is destroyed. Now it has nothing and it needs to rely on the rest of the Federation, which must be both humbling and frustrating to many Vulcans, on top of the extreme tragedy of losing everything. Most of their population, a lot of their history, their manufacturing, their scientific facilities, their resources, their animals, literally whatever else you can think of that a planet has--all gone. Now all of the survivors have lived some period on an alien planet, by definition, and they’re probably very dependent on the Federation not just to set up the new colony, but to replace all of the resources--natural and Vulcan-made--that they lost. And they’re a founding Federation member, Earth’s first contact. They’re especially important. And now they’re weak, and reliant on others.

So maybe Spock, early on, hears from New Vulcan and they’re not doing well. Maybe we hear from Sarek or T’Pring (...I’d just like to see reboot T’Pring). Maybe it’s not about, or just about, having children, but about being from an important and ancient family, and being seen as a hero for his part in the Narada mission, that makes him want to go and help rebuild their government (taking his mother’s place perhaps? she was on the High Council) or their scientific facilities, or the VSA, or their space travel capabilities--you know Vulcan had space ships of their own, outside of Federation ships. This would be the perfect place to showcase that tension between wanting to be independent--out of pride, out of fear, even--and needing help, because Vulcan could not survive without the Federation, probably less than 10 years out from the original planet’s destruction.

And then you feed it back into Krall.

So I could see like... well the tension, and then Krall comes in, and he's angry that the Federation "abandoned" him, but we actually explicitly address this. Maybe Spock gets to interact with him and say "I get it. You had a life and a mission and a purpose that was comfortable for you. Then the Federation came in and changed everything. A lot of my people are also feeling upset for similar reasons. But here's why actually you're wrong."

So anyway as you can see I’m smarter and more interesting than Simon Pegg.

I also hated, speaking of writers of this movie, the gay Sulu thing and HEAR ME OUT on this. It’s homophobic. His husband doesn’t have a name? Might not be his husband at all? Looks like he could be his nanny or his brother? As B said “at least grab his butt or something.” That was the most sanitized, no-homo depiction of a gay person I’ve ever seen. He’s gay (see, progressives and queers! gay! you like that right!) but DON’T WORRY STRAIGHTS--he’s in a monogamous relationship and has a child, he’ll show nothing but the most platonic physical affection with his male significant other, and the plot point will be so minuscule you’ll need a microscope to detect it. Also, we’ll throw in a no homo joke about two male characters not wanting to hug and we’ll make sure Kirk and Spock interact as little as possible, because we know they give off Big Queer Vibes every time they’re together.

Yes the last point is a little unfair but can you blame me for being angry about all the “look how hip to the times we are” back-patting that went on in 2016 when canonical bisexual Kirk is RIGHT THERE and we could have had ex-boyfriend Gary Mitchell instead of Unnamed Nanny??

Also Sulu is a hella random choice because again, like... he may not have had an s.o. in TOS but nor was there any indication he was gay. So it seems a LITTLE like they picked him because (1) his original actor is gay and gay people can’t play straight people duh so probably Sulu was Gay All Along I mean did you not get vibes???; and/or (2) asexual Asian stereotypes preclude giving Sulu any kind of love interest, male or female, that is actually... sexual, outright romantic, anything.

Anyway I can’t remember if I had any other thoughts, but I’ve said quite enough I think.

I miss Kirk so much... real Kirk... even my version of AOS Kirk who is probably not even characterized that well but at least I worked with love!!!

[su8arandspite]

For Old Time’s Sake

Summary: It’s 1995 in Hawkins. When Heather Johnson returns home for the Hawkins High School reunion, she comes face to face with an old lover. Or, alternatively, the one where Steve falls in love with Heather all over again.

Steve Harrington x oc

Warnings: 18+, mature content, smut

Tags: @casaharrington

The town of Hawkins kept its secrets well. From the outside, and to every kid who made a run for it after high school, not much about the town changed. Small town stillness washed over the buildings and suburban homes that Heather Johnson passed on the drive home to her parents’ place. If not for the empty lot where the Dairy Queen had been and the newly painted houses, Hawkins could have been a time machine to 1985.

She parked curbside outside of her childhood home. Through the trees, just past the Harrington home, she could vaguely make out the ruins of what was once Hawkins Lab. Even abandoned, it brought bile to her throat. When Heather left Hawkins, danger eschewed the rosy lens of childhood she knew it under. Time blurred and muddied her memories, but fleeting images of a boy with a baseball bat comforted her; whatever it was, they defeated it together.

Heather yanked the keys from the ignition. She didn’t come back to dig up old nightmares. Steadying her breath, she hauled her suitcase from the hatch of her car into her old home. Whatever she saw ten years ago in that shadowy building couldn’t hurt her now.

She retired to her bedroom that night with a head swimming in unsaid words and forgotten dreams she bottled up and left here in Hawkins. Traveling through the hallways of her parents’ house brewed an unwelcome, lonely sense of dejavú that could swallow Heather whole.

The door closed softly behind her. Heather looked to the window next door, partially out of habit, partially wrapped up in foolish hope, but instead found the curtains drawn. She longed for the secret notes passed through window panes on late nights and the stolen kisses as he stumbled into her bedroom. That was- they were- long gone now.

Now, standing alone in her girlish lilac bedroom, she felt like a stranger in her own life. The knick-knacks, trophies, polaroids, and photo booth strips belonged to someone else entirely. She thumbed over the picture frame sitting proudly on her nightstand, swiping the dust away from the picture-perfect memory of two smitten teens. Her mother must have retrieved it from the floor and replaced it sometime after she left. The crack down the center obscured her face, but she cared more about the way Steve looked at her. Just as she let herself want, her finger caught on the crack and blood sullied the cheap frame. Cursing, she cushioned the wound between her lips to dull the bleeding.

Heather Johnson blossomed into her own person through the past decade; she had a place to call her own, a job she felt passionately for, everything she once doubted she could earn without her Daddy’s help. Something about Hawkins, though, made that woman shrink slowly back into the scared girl who ran away from it.

High school for Heather looked picture perfect. In some ways, it had been, yet a part of her always felt sandwiched into the tiny pond that Hawkins was and desperate to swim upstream into the outside world. For someone with as many friends and as surrounded by people as Heather the Cheerleader had been, she never felt more lonely. Her friends’ parents worked boring desk jobs that required no traveling and most of them had one boyfriend or another to waste their time with. She kissed as many boys as she could just trying to make up for the loneliness she felt in her parents’ absence; it always found its way back. Until Steve.

Steve Harrington lived next door. He talked too much, slept around quite a bit, and had a poor taste in friends. Heather might nod along and listen as Laurie or Becky rambled off reasons why he could not be trusted, but she never cared to listen. She liked to think she knew Steve perfectly well.

The first time Heather met Steve, she might have agreed with what her friends thought of him. They knew each other only through summer block parties and whatever other events their parents dragged them to until 1982. That summer leading up to sophomore year changed a lot for Heather; her body filled out and her Dad started leaving home more. She took up a job lifeguarding at the community pool and returned to school in August sunkissed, slightly curvy, and in need of a little trouble. Steve, who received a shiny new BMW for his sixteenth birthday, looked exactly like the kind of trouble she wanted.

She had him completely, utterly wrapped around her finger by the end of September. Heather and Steve soiled every inch of that car as summer came to autumn. She only meant to distract herself, but her desire for fire and trouble died down into an ache for the boy next door. Heather let herself love him wholly. Steve became her future; he tamed her rebellious spirit into a lovestruck girl who wanted only for him to stay with her forever.

Forever, for Heather and Steve, instead became the beginning of junior year. He stomped on her heart and spit it right back at her. As Heather pulled back to lick her wounds, Steve zeroed in on his next prey. Nancy Wheeler stood for everything Heather could never be. Girls like Nancy didn’t just offer up their virginities to the first boy who called them pretty or invent their own hangover cures out of necessity. Heather hated the thought of Steve with someone like that, because she could never be half as good. Good girls like Nancy shone like blank canvases void of any tarnish and squeaky-clean enough to bring home to Mom; Heather the Whore and her Father-sized baggage could never compete with a girl like that.

Even now, the sight of that swimming pool nauseated her. Mr. Harrington had it drained years ago, but she only saw the very end of Barbara Holland’s life, the thing that took her, and the boy she still loved already falling for Nancy Wheeler, all right outside her bedroom window. Heather yanked her curtains shut. The demogorgon might be unreachable now, but nothing so far healed her battered little heart.

---

“Joey, you little shit! Let go of your sister’s hair”

Heather clung to the kitchen island, watching as the red-headed toddlers tornadoed across the living room. Carol stormed out of the bedroom sporting only one shoe and looking more grown up than Heather ever imagined she would be. Tommy and Carol’s wedding unsurprisingly predated the prompt birth of their first child by mere months. Between the two nightmares currently messing up their house and the heavily pregnant bump in her purple gown, Carol looked about one temper tantrum away from a spectacular breakdown of her own.

However exhausted parenthood and married life looked to someone like Heather, that new sheen in Carol’s eyes and the bizarrely adult change in Tommy’s demeanor suggested otherwise. The life of a Hawkins housewife, with all its cliquey glory and PTA snobs, suited Carol’s catty nature and, to everyone’s surprise, fatherhood had calmed Tommy’s recklessness. Heather took one look at their messy, chaotic, love-filled life, and her confidence crumbled. Her life in New York outpaced anything Hawkins could offer her, but she couldn’t pretend that she had once not wanted anymore more than this life with Steve.

“For fuck’s sake Tommy, would you hurry up?”

Carol herded her husband towards the door, cursing under her breath at his inability to correctly tie a necktie. If not for the wedding rings and Carol’s baby bump, Heather might have mistaken the scene for a recreation of their senior prom night.

Heather piled into the backseat of Carol’s mini-van. Tommy stuck his head out of the driver’s seat as they sped off to Hawkins High, screaming:

“Class of ‘85, motherfuckers!”

Carol yanked him back into the car by the collar. She added a swift smack to the head for good measure. Heather smiled to herself; at least some things never did change.

As the burgundy minivan pulled into the spot once reserved for Heather’s Jeep, she saw her life from the outside. Without the safety of her green and white cheerleading outfit, Hawkins High School looked a whole lot less impressive than back in the day.

Tommy and Carol dispersed into the crowd not long after their arrival, while Heather gravitated towards the open bar. She greeted passersby who recognized her and watched the crowd swell. She stirred her drink absently and watched the night unfold around her.

Old cheer squad members earned careers in fashion or television or teaching. Her third grade best friend married her ninth grade lab partner. Old Hawkins friends gathered like nothing ever changed, but Heather felt acutely aware that everything had.

Meanwhile, Steve tore himself away from a conversation with a few classmates he only vaguely remembered. He stopped a few feet away from her, as if unsure whether or not to proceed.

Time dealt Steve Harrington the short hand. He stayed in Hawkins, he told himself, not out of fear but just to keep an eye on things for a while. Jim Hopper promised to call if any more monsters popped up. No need, he said. I think I’ll stick around a while longer. First, Nancy and Jonathan Byers, even Billy Hargrove, graduated and took the fast track out of town. By the time Dustin and Lucas and Mike and the rest of the rugrats set off to college, Steve was fresh out of excuses.

Hopper took a quick visit down to the record store where Steve took up a job to pay his bills. He leaned down over the counter Steve worked behind and lowered his voice:

“What the hell are you still doing here, kid? We both know you don’t belong in this shithole.”

“Yeah,” he deadpanned. “You’re probably right”

Hopper, more a father to Steve than his own ever was, refused to let him give up like this. Where Steve saw in himself the self-righteous asshole who vandalized the town movie theater, Hopper saw the young man who readily put his own life on the line to save those kids.

“Look, I don’t really care what you do,” he lied. “Just quit feeling sorry for yourself and do something with your life.”

The next morning, Hopper arrived at the station to find Steve Harrington sitting with his tail between his legs in the chair facing his desk. By that time the next year, he was the latest member of the Hawkins PD. And a damn good one at that, he might add.

For the first time in his life, Steve had everything he could want. Everything, that is, except someone to share it with.

His heart skittered as he worked up the courage to get Heather alone. He’d heard that she came alone and wanted little more than to catch her attention. Things ended so badly between them- his fault, really- that he hardly imagined she wanted to see him again. So, with the same sense of humility as that fateful morning in Chief Hopper’s office, he tapped her shoulder:

“Save me a dance? For old time’s sake.”

Gooseflesh rippled her bare arms; she would recognize that voice anywhere. Heather set her cocktail glass on the bar, turning her head towards him. He looked the spitting image of the nervous boy who first asked to take her out to the movies. Hands scrunched in his suit pockets, and sporting the very same crooked smile she remembered, Steve Harrington stood before her.

Heather’s powder blue dress blended well with her skin tone in the dim gym lighting and her dark hair popped against the fabric. His heart swelled at the sight of her standing in the very same gym they shared their first kiss in. Steve wondered how he ever let a girl like that slip through his fingers.

“Okay,” she said. “For old time’s sake”

He led her by the hand to the makeshift dance floor, feeling for the first time in ages the sweaty anticipation of a lovestruck school boy. Her rosy cheeks swelled with a smile in tandem with her shaky hands as they locked between the ducktail of hair at the nape of his neck. His hands resting easily on her hips, they danced.

“Y’know,” he chuckled. “I really didn’t expect to see you again. I’m glad I did”

The way he looked at her, even after all these years, sent Heather to the verge of tears; no one had looked at her like since she was a teenager. Since she and Steve were in love.

“Yeah,” her voice came out soft and small. “Me, too.”

They’d come full circle. Although life led them in different directions, and took Heather and Steve to the wrong people in their journey to find the love they first had in each other, it seemed their story looped back to that dingy old gym. Steve knew the second he saw her that tonight would be a whole lot more than reminiscing with a lost lover. Even if Heather didn’t know that, yet, Steve didn’t mind waiting.

Steve would wait forever for her if it only meant that he could see that smile one last time. The way her brown eyes sparkled in the dim lighting, the way her hips filled out the fabric of her gown, the way her delicate touch ghosted over him as they danced; Heather was filled with reminders of the way he once loved her. The way Steve still loved her.

Heather cupped his cheek, stroking it with her thumb and watching after him with a melancholy smile.

“I am so proud of you,” she whispered.

Heather clung to her once-lover long past the end of slow songs, the two swaying to synthetic pop tunes. It seemed that each of them darted around fears that, should they let go of each other, they might never get the chance to do so again. Whether she admitted it to herself or not, Heather let herself believe that, maybe, she was always meant to find her way back to him. She felt not like an adult but once again like a teenage girl nervously dancing with the prom date of her dreams.

He nuzzled his nose forward against her cheek. His hot breath fanned out against her skin and pulled her in even more. The sweet, mesmerizing scent of Steve’s rosewood cologne, the ghost of spearmint chewing gum, and a hint of musk hypnotized Heather. As he finally kissed her, Heather folded into his touch. The kiss was a decade in the making, the kind featured on movie screens and cheesy discount novels. Every word they were too afraid to speak into existence and all their repressed emotions poured into the kiss.

Reluctantly, he broke off the kiss. Only as the final song of the night faded into its closing note did Heather pull herself away from his warmth. Steve stole a quick kiss to her cheek. They walked slowly towards the edge of the dance floor.

“Here,” he said. Steve draped his sports coat over Heather’s shoulders.

Hair bouncing along with his lopsided grin, Steve couldn’t take his eyes off of Heather and that captivating laugh of hers. Even as she led him away from the dance floor, Steve found himself absorbed in her. Her neatly styled hair fell rebelliously out of place, the heat on her cheeks and perspiration from nerves and the dancing all adding just the right amount of lived-in smudge to her make-up. Heather looked radiant. The words fell out of his loose lips like thoughts so strong that his mouth couldn’t contain them:

“You’re beautiful.”

She slumped into a seat, letting out a breathy laugh. He slid into the empty chair beside her. Although his mind seemed acutely aware that they were running on borrowed time, Steve swore that the night would last forever. Time was edging on despite his best efforts to run backwards against the current; he would never be fifteen again, and their relationship would never be from a clean slate again.

She thanked him quietly. Another stolen kiss followed. The night grew thin around them, their classmates retiring to whatever lives they put on pause for the night's trip down memory lane, but neither could be bothered to tear themselves away. Heather was quiet for some time afterwards, trying to make sense of her emotions. Steve turned to her, forehead pulled in thought:

“We made quite the mess, didn’t we?”

Heather paused, tearing herself away from the fears of yesterday. Her eyes flickered to him. She smiled sadly. All Steve has to do was stay. When it was Heather’s turn to choose Steve, she decided to run instead. It seemed neither of them had the courage to face the very real feelings between them that even time and betrayal couldn’t seem to erase.

“Yeah,” she said eventually. “We sure did.”

He chuckled dryly, rubbing his palms together in thought. The universe seemed to laugh at them, to revel in the tragedy of their bad timing; love itself just wasn’t enough to make them work. His eyes begged Heather to ease his nerves. Steve needed Heather to give him some sign that this was more than just in his head.

“Why is this so hard for us?”

The worry in his tired face looked all too familiar to Heather. A sinking feeling returned to her stomach.

It wasn’t until the summer after graduation that Heather let herself start to forgive Steve for breaking her heart. With the drama and confines of high school now behind them, Heather and Steve vowed to make that summer theirs. A last hurrah of bad decisions with minimal consequences. What they intended to be a string of crashed house parties and getting drunk by the quarry instead was a summer filled with late-night conversations on the hood of Steve’s car. With Heather often teetering between sunburnt and sun-kissed after a shift at the community pool and Steve sticky and burnt out from serving ice cream at Starcourt Mall, they lacked much time or energy to live out the summer they outlined.

Neither of them really minded the extra time to themselves. In fact, Steve soon found himself excited for his shift to end and comforted by the knowledge that Heather was waiting for him in the parking lot, food in hand. By late June, Heather had his order memorized and Billy Hargrove had stopped trying to get her to hang around with him past closing time. That was how they found themselves devouring take out from Dairy Queen, still in their work uniforms, and sitting closer than necessary on the BMW.

She wiped the grease from her fingers with a napkin, laughing. Heather caught a glimpse of Steve in her peripheral vision- dripping with happiness, a shine to his eyes, his Scoops Ahoy sailor hat sagging lowly on his head.

Having Heather back in his life, even if only for brief, stolen moments on the hood of his BMW and late summer nights thick with their past, the future; it patched up the broken parts of his battered heart. She felt like home. It might only be for the summer, but Steve fully intended to hold onto every second with Heather that he could.

“Hey, Steve?”

He looked so eager, so happy to see her. Steve wouldn’t even know what hit him. That summer, he slowly tore down the walls their break-up built against her and she knew from the start that she couldn’t take him with her. The thing about running away from her problems, it seemed, was that Heather had to abandon every good thing in her life right along with the bad. Unfortunately, that included Steve.

She knew she should have told him from the beginning, that she never should have let herself get that close to him again so soon before leaving town. Heather should have told him, and yet she couldn't bring herself to break it to him. Not that Heather hadn’t tried to; she had, many times. It just hurt too much.

His laughter tapered off into an inquisitive hum.

“Do you ever think about leaving Hawkins?”

Maybe it had treated him less than kindly the past year or so, but it was still the only home Steve had ever known. The thought of skipping town never crossed his mind. He decided a long time ago that he would stand his ground and fight until his dying breath if he had to- Steve was braver, more stubborn than Heather that way. Another reason she would tell herself they didn’t work out; Steve Harrington was a fighter but Heather Johnson was a survivor. And sometimes that meant putting herself first.

“No, I can’t say that I have. Why?”

She shrugged, uncharacteristically shy:

“I don’t know,” she balled the napkin up into a makeshift stress ball. “I-I just think maybe I need to get out of this town, Steve. Parts of me can’t seem to shake what I saw, what I did-“

She let Barbara Holland die. Heather watched from her bedroom and did nothing as the thing ate her whole. And when she saw the damn thing again, she hadn’t been strong enough to kill it. She couldn’t save its future victims.

“Hey,” Steve pulled her under his arm. “Don’t say that, okay? You did what you could… We all did. It’s not your fault.”

Tilting her chin upwards with his fingertips, Steve pressed a meaningful kiss to her lips. She leaned into him. His embrace quieted her thoughts enough to mute her worries away. It wasn’t the first kiss they shared that summer, but something hid behind it that made Heather unable to shake him- so much so that she lost her nerve to break the news to him. She left Hawkins the next morning, while Steve dreamt of seeing her again.

The guilt ate at her from the inside out until the town she once loved only suffocated her with living nightmares and her own inadequacies. Deep down, Heather knew that running away from her problems would not solve anything. Still, she craved a change of scenery, an escape from the reminders of what Hawkins truly was under its all-American suburban facade. Hawkins was, quite simply, home to the gates of Hell and Heather didn’t want to stick around and wait for them to crack their way open again.

They had, eventually, done just that; only, Heather wasn’t by Steve’s side that July Fourth when he needed her the most.

Steve stood abruptly, offering her his hand:

“You want to get a drink?”

Nodding, she smiled. The last thing she wanted was to leave Steve’s side. Heather took his hand and followed him through the parking lot. They walked in a comfortable silence. She squeezed his hand in hers.

“Steve?”

The pair paused beside his car. Heather glanced up at him with the guilt of a child caught breaking their parents’ valuables while playing inside the house.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you I was leaving,” she paused. “I should have.”

Steve’s eyes softened. He brushed loose hair from her face, smiling sadly.

“I know you are,” he said. “It’s okay, Heather. That was a long time ago.”

Forgiven or not, Heather still juggled her feelings of guilt and lingering feelings for Steve between stolen glances on the drive home. He may have absolved her, but Heather still needed

to forgive herself first.

“Come on,” Steve opened the passenger door. “How ‘bout that drink?”

---

The pair of them stumbled into Steve’s old bedroom between stolen kisses and wandering hands. Retracing steps from a lifetime ago, they fumbled blindly in the dim lighting, too utterly consumed in each other to care much for the world outside those walls. There was only the electric rush of pure, raw sexual chemistry and unresolved feelings.

Steve pulled back momentarily, lips dripping in unspoken words. Heather shook her head, stroking his cheek sensually with her thumb:

“Not now, Steve,” she shushed him, her waiting kiss soaking up his silent fears.

He pulled her hips flush against his torso, working blindly on her dress zipper. Steve’s rough palms explored every inch of her flesh that he could reach. He pinched purple hickies into the crook of her neck, chasing after her as her head flopped in pleasure. Heather hadn’t let anyone mark her skin that way in years. Steve made her feel young again, like his touch was the Fountain of Youth and she was Ponce de Leon, drinking him in deeply.

Her dress pooled on the floor around her feet as Steve pushed the thin straps from her shoulders. She looked even more mesmerizing than he remembered. Heather grew into her curves; time transformed her from a bewitching teenage beauty to the woman of Steve’s dreams. And he wanted to feel, to taste, every inch of her.

Spreading her legs apart ever so slightly, Steve dropped to his knees before her. He thumbed at her through the meager fabric of her lace panties. Another hickey on her smooth upper thigh. He groaned at the smell of her arousal. His expert mouth latched hungrily onto her core through the fabric.

Heather wriggled in pure, hot pleasure against his magical lips. Her fingers dug into his scalp, pulling on his hair just the way she knew drove him crazy. Steve pushed aside her panties, buried his nose, his lips into her most sensitive nerves. She tasted like heaven to him, the mere sight of her writhing above him an ethereal vision. Her taste dizzied him and Steve coddled her closer to his lips.

Steve loved the chase almost as much as the kill itself. He knew what he was doing, and knew he was damn good at it, too. If Steve had been a wolf in the bedroom as a teenager, then the only thing to stop him now was a silver bullet. And Heather was his full moon.

Her first orgasm hit hard and unexpectedly early, received by Steve’s eager tongue. He pulled her in by the neck for another kiss. The salty taste of her own arousal clinging to his breath intrigued Heather; touching Steve turned all her other experiences into blurry non-memories. Touching Steve felt like coming home after a long day.

The sight of Steve in all his naked glory sent Heather into a tizzy. She licked teasingly along his length, easing her way into giving him the head of his life. As she worked, Heather focused in on the bliss reflected in his face.

“Jesus,” he whined. “I forgot how good you were at that.”

Eager to be inside her, Steve reluctantly pulled her back up to her feet. He backed her up against the bed. Heather melted back against his pillows, a siren waiting for him to fall right into her trap. He kneeled over her figure. Steve kissed her sweetly. One hand thumbed at her clit. In one fluid motion, he pushed inside her.

Steve loved the way she clung to her. Her touch only egged him on. Steve rutted into her deeply. He made love to her with a veracity and dedication that put every other man she’d been with to shame. It was only Steve.

With one final grunt sandwiched by her name, Steve came deep inside of her.

She fell back against his sheets, spent in a fucked-out bliss. Heather felt her life in the city slipping further from her mind the more Steve Harrington and his magnificent cock drew her to a future here.

“Do you remember what you said to me the night Nancy and I broke up?”

Heather hummed in her sleepy daze, nodding:

“Sure, I do.”

“Did you mean it?”

She rolled over on the pillow to face him, fully awake now. Heather blinked through the darkness. Grasping in the dark, she clamped their hands together. From behind his messy hair, Steve looked like a shivering puppy left out in the rain. A soft smile graced her lips. She thought of the last time she saw that look.

“She never loved me.”

Nancy might have been the good girl toying around with Hawkins’ playboy, but instead she tore Steve to shreds and ran for the hills. Now, he wanted someone to sympathize with him. Heather, though, had no room in her life to be anyone’s second choice.

Heather tossed the hat to her candy striper costume on the duvet, sighing. She pawed at the vomit stain on her skirt with a damp towel. Perhaps the only person in town who had missed Steve and Nancy’s fallout, Heather left Tina’s party early to lull a dangerously intoxicated Brittany Matthews home before she ruined anyone else’s costume.

“What? Why are you even here, Steve?”

“I don’t know,” he shrunk down. “This is the first place I thought of.”

Oblivious to his pity party, Heather fussed about. She tried to clean the night’s memory of her drunken, sophomore team mate nearly passed out on Tina’s front porch right off her dress right along with the stain.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Steve?”

“Nancy,” he suddenly fell sheepish. “She never loved me.”

Heather watched after him, incredulous. Her hands gripped at the soiled towel as she bit her tongue. Steve, craving some sort of reaction from her, pressed on:

“I should have known,” he sulked. “I mean…God, when did I become such a fuck-up? This is bullshit. Of course it was. I should have known no one could love me-”

“Oh, fuck you! I did! I loved you so much, Steve. You had to have known that.

“What? Heather-”

“You broke my fucking heart, Steve. I’m not about to pretend that I didn’t see this coming and I’m sure as hell not your shoulder to cry on”

She tossed the soiled washcloth right at his chest. If Steve hadn’t been crying before, he sure was now. Still no movement.

“But-“

“I think you should leave.”

When he made no moves to do so, some part of her snapped right along with the last string of her heart that still reached out for Steve. She plucked the picture frame from her nightstand, their picture, and chucked it towards him, only narrowly missing his head. It landed on the floor under her dresser, as cracked and broken as their relationship, where it stayed until well after Heather graduated and left home.

“Get the fuck out, Steve.”

He faltered a moment, her words hitting him full-force with the one thing he must have known and feared but chose to ignore for the past year. Thick layers of tears caked his cheeks. Steve moved slowly and fluidly back towards the window he snuck in through, hoping all the while that he might uncover some magic words to undo the damage he slung onto her poor heart. He found only silence, and by the time his feet hit the ground, Steve knew he’d really done it this time.

He wanted only to be the carefree fifteen-year-old who got to kiss her in secret moments shared in the backseat of his BMW and late at night in her bedroom, when her parents were asleep. Steve wanted Heather back, but this was too little, too late. She locked the window behind him.

Looking at him now, her heart ached. The stubborn parts of her hadn’t forgiven him for breaking her heart all those years ago. Yet, she mostly just wanted him.

“Yes.”

Steve pressed his lips lightly to her knuckles.

“For what it’s worth, I loved you too.”

Steve leaned over the extra pillows to face her.  

When Steve awoke the next morning, he found himself surprised to see her messy hair splayed out across the pillow beside him, and utterly bewitched by the sight of Heather curling into the sheets as she slept soundly in his bed. He thought, though not for the first time in his life, that he might like to wake each day to the sight.

Later, as he walked her to her car, the idea still bounced around his mind. He grabbed at her hips, using every last drop of cheekiness to woo her away from that car. Steve let Heather go once before and he spent the next ten years regretting it.

“Stay.”

“You know I can’t.”

“What’s keeping you?

She exhaled with a soft laugh. Her home, her friends, her career, all waited for her back in the city. The only thing Hawkins, Indiana had that New York City didn’t was Steve Harrington.

“I’m sorry,” she kissed his lips sweetly. “Goodbye, Steve.”

He stood at the curb, hands balled into his shorts pockets, and watched her drive off until the Honda turned out of sight. Steve smiled after her, sporting the same smile he’d flashed the first time he told her his name, only this time a bitterness hid behind it.

Like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom, Heather knew better than to turn around, knew his puppy dog eyes would trap her here forever, melt her down into a pillar of salt. And, like Lot’s wife, she did anyways.

She knew she’d see him again, if only in her dreams.

-----

Heather nervously twirled the phone cord around her finger. She stared at the slip of paper and dialed his phone number, her mind stuck over the words. The last time she felt this afraid, Heather lodged an axe into the neck of an interdimensional monster. This time, though, she knew that wouldn’t solve her problems.

“Steve? I need to see you.”

The trek to Indiana did little to calm her nerves. She drove silently, the radio turned down to silence. No matter how many times Heather practiced the speech in her head, it didn’t get any easier.

She stood at his doorstep. Fiddling with her hands, she contemplating blowing him off. Heather felt out of place at his apartment. To her, Steve would always be the boy next door. No matter what happened tonight. She thought of him always as he was then- handsome, full of life, brimming with dreams. Full of love for her.

When he opened the door to let her in, Steve couldn’t dull his smile. He looked almost the same as the boy in her memories. The love hadn’t quite left his eyes yet. It was with the comfort of this thought that she stepped inside.

Steve’s apartment was neat, small, homely. She could see him settling down before the TV with a beer or fussing over his hair in the mirror by the door. The thought made her smile.

He sat down with her on the couch, hands clasping with hers. His bright eyes watched her closely, waiting and ready to accept her back into his life.

“Is everything okay? You sounded upset on the phone.”

“I just- I wanted to talk.”

“Talk?”

He blinked. Steve knew this song and dance and he was tired of trying to keep her here. Tired of letting her toy with his heart.

“I haven’t seen or heard from you in months and you came all this way just to talk?”

Steve told himself he would hear her out, but his emotions got the best of him. He raised his voice in frustration. The abrupt shift in tone caught her off guard. She hadn’t meant to upset him. Heather deflated in her seat, the speech she’d had prepared now stuck in her throat.

“Forget it,” she rose. “I don’t even know why I came here.”

He followed her out onto the sidewalk. Heather walked out of his life too many times for him to let her go again.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know! Home, I guess.”

“Don’t you dare walk away from me again!”

The brunette stopped in her tracks, whirled around to face him. Angry, frustrated tears welled in her eyes. He stood just close enough for her to touch. Close enough for her to feel his heart breaking.

“And why not? We both already know how this ends.”

“I love you so much that it hurts. Why can’t you just admit that you want this, too?”

“That’s not why I came back, Steve.”

“Well, then, what? Is this some kind of a game to you-“

“I’m pregnant.”

His expression blanked. Steve didn’t know the first thing about fatherhood. His own gave him next to nothing to start from; the last thing he wanted was to find himself repeating his father’s shitty parenting style. He liked to think that he had finally shed the damage his absentee parents did to him, and that he had found a way to fill the gap their cold demeanor created where affection should have been in his childhood, but that didn’t stop his fears of repeating the vicious cycle.

Heather looked just as afraid.

“Do you really think we’re ready to be parents?”

“No,” he held her hand tighter in his. “But I know that I’m not my father and we can learn from our parents’ mistakes. You’re my future, Heather”

“Do you mean that?”

“Of course, I do.”

They sat together on his front porch steps. Silence engulfed them for a moment as her earth shattering news settled in. Fear crept back up on Heather the longer he stayed quiet. Did Steve want to raise this child with her? Did he want her? Her questions and insecurities were overwhelming.

She broke into tears. “I’m scared, Steve.”

“Me, too.”

He held her close to his chest as she cried. A few tears slipped from his own eyes. Steve combed his fingers through her hair and whispered comforts into her ear. Suddenly, he saw a future for himself. A modest, comfortable cottage with a nice yard for the kids to play in, maybe a dog too, and Heather standing beside him with all the love in the world in her eyes. It was comforting, warm. He wanted that future, with her.

“Stay here, with me. I love you, Heather, and I want to raise this baby with you, if you’ll have me.”

Sniffling, she turned her chin upwards to face him.

“Okay,” she said. “Yes, I will. I love you, too, Steve.”

As he pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, Steve knew that everything would turn out okay. He loved Heather Johnson and that was enough for him.

[imagines-so-what-if]

I is for Impressing You

Headcanon and scenarios for Sherlock, Mycroft, and Moriarty 

The prompt: How he tries to impress you.

Genre: Fwuff.

Rating: K+

Reader type: Quiet, patient, shy

SHERLOCK MASTERLIST

Headcanons for Sherlock trying to impress you.

Bby boy is all about trying to impress you with his deductions. It’s his pride and joy, after all!

He’ll absolutely put down others in front of you (especially Anderson).

“Were you born without a brain or did you lose it when s/he entered the room?”

“How that tiny little brain of yours is developed enough for you to speak is a scientific miracle.”  

Will call  everyone else but you an idiot.

Might unintentionally insult you by deducing you.

Loves explaining things to you. Even if you know the answer he’ll still enjoy telling it to you.

Embodiment of sass and sarcasm.

Will attempt to succeed in whatever interests you (for example if you’re big into cooking he’ll try to make an elaborate dish for you).

He’ll drag you along on his cases so you have more chances to be impressed by him.

Sherlock scenario 

You hovered near the back of the crime scene beside John. You were technically a civilian so you really shouldn’t be there, but Sherlock had effectively dragged you along with him and John. Still, you didn’t want to accidentally contaminate evidence or cause an issue with the already irritated officers, so you tried to stay out of the way to the best of your ability.

Sherlock was kneeling beside the body, his eyes rapidly moving about as he examined it.

Without looking up he snapped, “Shut up, Anderson.”

The man who had walked into the crime scene just then halted. He was beside you so you could clearly see the flush of anger on his cheeks. “I haven’t even said anything!”

“I can hear your lecherous thoughts about Y/N. Remove yourself before you waste any more of the air here.”

At the word lecherous you blushed bright red in embarrassment. The man named Anderson stammered out, “I was not!”

You shuffled a couple steps away from him and he threw you a look of disbelief.

“Leave,” Greg sighed. “You’ll only rile him up.”

The man looked thoroughly offended and gave Greg a scathing look of disapproval, but he did turn around leave.

Greg turned to look at Sherlock and asked, “Well?”

“Solved it,” Sherlock said brusquely, abruptly standing back up. “Ridiculously easy, I’m sure you could figure it out on your own within a month or so.”

“So what happened?” You asked hesitantly.

Sherlock looked at you, fixing you with his sharp blue eyes. He took a deep breath and then launched into a huge monologue explaining how the victim was obviously killed by her sister. He listed such minor and seemingly unimportant clues but which all added up to the big revelation. You couldn’t help but be impressed by his deduction and you exclaimed at the end, “That’s amazing! You’re so brilliant, Sherlock.”

His lips twitched and he cocked his head. “Well, yes.”

“If this was so easy why did it catch your attention?” John asked, struggling not to grin at Sherlock.

Sherlock glared seethingly at him. “How could I have known it would be so alarmingly easy before coming here?”

“Well I mean you first rejected coming here and then all of a sudden Y/N shows up and suddenly it’s a fascinating case—”

“Your memory is failing you, Watson,” Sherlock snapped. “Case is solved, end of story.” Then he looked back over at you, blue eyes burning into your own. “You haven’t eaten yet, but you’re hungry. Let’s go.”

“O-Okay,” you managed to get out before Sherlock grabbed your hand and dragged you away again.

You could hear John and Greg’s laughter behind you.

Headcanons for Mycroft trying to impress you

Mycroft is subtle with how he impresses you. He’s not one for grand gestures or drama.

He already knows he’s an impressive man, and he’s certain you already know it, too.

That being the case there are times where he can’t resist showing off. For example he might play a strategy game against his brother or someone else you know of high intelligence (chess for example) and you “coincidentally” walk in on him winning.

He’ll prepare elaborate meals for you and not tell you he made them until after you’ve already praised them.

He’ll subtly steer conversations so he can slip in some of his impressive feats.

He will without a doubt casually put down anyone he views as competition when you’re in earshot.

Backhanded compliments are his bread and butter for this.

“Oh, yes the report looks extremely put together considering it was done by a primary school child.”

“A truly fascinating story. You’ve almost been upgraded from imbecile to a vaguely interesting imbecile.”

“What a charming mind you have! Thinking for an instant s/he would take any sort of interesting in you. My, I wish I could experience such wild delusions like you.”

Mycroft scenario 

You were returning home after a long day of errands, expecting to find it empty. To your delight, however, you saw the lights were on in Mycroft’s study. As soon as you entered your home you could smell something absolutely delicious dominate most of the house.

You wanted to go to the kitchen to see what new lovely creation Mycroft made, but you were more excited to see your husband. 

With a skip in your heart you moved quickly through the halls, slowing down as you heard Mycroft’s voice along with someone else’s. It sounded like his brother, but that would have been odd. Sherlock didn’t typically visit Mycroft (if anything it was the other way around, or you playing messenger for them). 

Still, stranger things have happened.

You walked in on the library, surprised to find that the lovely smell was also coming from it. You immediately spotted a decadent cake—your favorite kind!— and you felt your stomach sing praises at that. 

“... Checkmate, brother mine.”

“Tt.” 

Reluctantly, you looked away from the mouth-watering cake and over at Sherlock and Mycroft. The two were sitting opposite of one another at Mycroft’s gorgeous chess table. Sherlock was perched on the edge of the chair and looked, for all intents and purposes, like an angry kitten told it was time to take a bath. Mycroft on the other hand was perfectly at ease with a small bemused smile on his face.

Both men looked up at your entrance. Sherlock glaring and Mycroft’s eyes gleaming. “Welcome home, my dear.”

“Thank you,” you returned. “Sherlock, everything okay? You hardly come here.”

“A little wager, that’s all,” Mycroft smoothly answered on his brother’s behalf. “He lost, though, and now he has to pay up. The case file will be by the front door. Do you require assistance—?”

“I know where the front door is,” Sherlock snapped, standing up with grace and grabbing his coat off the back of the chair. He tilted his head towards you. “Good evening, Y/N.”

“Be safe going home,” you said, patting Sherlock on the shoulder as he brushed past you. Then you turned back towards Mycroft, gesturing towards the cake. “Whatever is the occasion?”

“Oh, nothing really,” Mycroft hummed, standing up from his chair and straightening out the nonexistent crinkles in his coat. “A new recipe. Care to try?”

“Mycroft I know it’ll be heavenly. You’re always such an amazing cook.”

“Of course, of course,” he demurred, “but can’t a man want to his impress you?”

You blushed, smiling shyly at him. “We’ve been married for five years, Mycroft...”

“Time won’t change my desire, my dear. I will always want to impress you.”

Headcanons for Moriarty trying to impress you

This guy is all about grand gestures.

He’ll buy you expensive things and fly you out to random and exotic places. He’ll arrange fireworks to cover the London sky; he’ll rent out an amusement park for a whole day (or more) for you; he’ll take you to ridiculously expensive places.

It’s easy to show off with money and it’s one of the few things he’s comfortable doing. Everyone has a price, right?

Still that won’t be enough. Sure you could be impressed with the wealth he’s accumulated but that doesn’t mean you’re impressed with him. He’ll show off his intellect at every chance he gets.

He’ll manipulate events and conversations to his benefit. He’ll want every interaction you have him with to leave you in awe.

He’ll base it off of your interests. Interested in writing? Coincidentally he’s published a few books. Like to cook? Oh, wow, guess who’s won a Michelin star. Big fan of whatever fandom? Guess who’s buying the franchise.

Everything he does and says will be over the top.

(If you’ve been with him long enough he’ll actually start to compete against himself over past actions to impress you.)

He will absolutely brag about his criminal achievements and particularly elaborate plots.

Moriarty scenario 

It was still early on in your relationship with him. You’d been friends with Jim for a few years now, but your relationship was mostly through online messages. You hadn’t met him in person until a week ago when you moved to London.

It was actually rather odd. You were miraculously offered your dream job! And amazingly enough a crazy cheap (it was almost exactly as much as you could afford for a flat without having to live paycheck to paycheck) flat in a gorgeous neighborhood (frankly you didn’t believe the pricing given to you could really be it because it was so beautiful). 

When you had moved into the new home (somehow a lot of your old stuff got destroyed by the movers on the way so they paid you ten times the price it was worth to replace so in addition you got brand new furniture that you sorely needed) you almost instantly got a message from Jim asking to meet in real life.

The meeting had been brief since you had to get ready for work—he met you at a cute little café near your new home—but absolutely delightful. The two of you instantly connected and you were enamored by his brilliant mind and charming wit.

You had only been able to meet up a few more times after that until tonight.

Tonight was first “proper” date with him.

Now you knew Jim was wealthy (he was upfront about that after the two of you became friends) but that didn’t matter to you. You liked Jim for his addicting personality and you loved talking with him.

Still, you were caught off guard by how crazy expensive the restaurant was that he had taken you. It was in the heart of London and everyone was elegantly dressed.

You felt oddly out of place there, but Jim was quick to put you at ease with his warm banter.

The two of you sat down at a small little table. It was lit by candlelight and the music and conversation swelled around you.

“What do you think?” he asked, leaning towards you across the table.

“I-It’s gorgeous. Certainly very busy though, isn’t it? They must be constantly booked,” you replied, looking around. Every table was filled, after all.

“Is it too loud for you? Too many people?”

It was a bit intimidating being surrounded by so many beautiful and obviously rich people, but you didn’t want to say that out loud. He was treating you, after all. It would be rude to speak ill of his choice.

“Oh, I wouldn’t—”

Moriarty smiled charmingly at you, a gleam in his eyes. Something about his gaze made your voice fall silent. With great care and grace he lifted up his wine glass and gently tapped his spoon against it. On the third chime everyone else in the restaurant fell silent.

Then in the next second they all got up and filed out. You watched them leave with wide eyes, mouth slightly agape. Within the minute the restaurant was entirely silent save for the sound of the candles flickering.

Moriarty watched you with that same smile on his face. “Better, my dear?”

“U-Um—wow.”

He winked. “Oh don’t say that so soon. I’ll give you a real reason for that praise later tonight.”

[brigdh]

October Readings

In which I read a bunch horror novels because it's Halloween. Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. A novel in the recent genre of "Lovecraft but with antiracism". In this one, the main character Atticus Turner is a young black man in the 1950s who has just discovered that he is the closest living descendant of a powerful wizard from early America (via Atticus's great-great-great-however many times grandmother, who escaped from slavery the same night the wizard accidentally immolated himself and everyone he was close to in an attempt to gain greater power). The wizard's surviving followers have tracked Atticus down and would like to use him for a ritual he is not intended to survive. They kidnap his father to force Atticus to follow him to their creepy small town in rural New England. This sets off a series of events in which Atticus, his extended family, and several friends are repeatedly caught up in supernatural events: a coup within the wizard cabal, haunted houses, magic potions that grant tempting powers, visits to distant planets, devilishly evil – literally! – cops, treasure hunts for mysterious artifacts, and so on. Each chapter is relatively disconnected from the others and focuses on a different character, so the book has somewhat of the feel of a series of short stories rather than a regular novel. Since Lovecraft himself was more of a story writer than a novelist, the homage is obvious. Through it all, though, the specter of Jim Crow racism proves more dangerous and pervasive than any creature from another dimension. One of the most haunting sections is a flashback to the childhood of Atticus's father, when he escaped the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. I wanted to like this book more than I did. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly; I just wanted it to go a bit deeper or explore further than it ever actually did. Most of this is down to the short story-esque format; since each one has a new narrator and plot, I never got to know any of the individuals well enough. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly scary book either, though to be fair it's not trying to be. The concept of wizards competing over ancient books of power is really the only detail it takes from Lovecraft. There's no ancient gods or mind-breaking geometry man was not meant to comprehend here, nor races of squid-people. Lovecraft Country is apparently being produced by HBO as a series, which seems like a great idea. I suspect this is one of those cases where an adaptation (particularly a serial one, like a TV show) could do more with the material than the original did. Bone White by Ronald Malfi. A horror novel set in contemporary rural Alaska. Paul Gallo has a contentious relationship with his drop-out druggie twin, Danny, but ever since Danny disappeared a year ago while on a trip to "find himself", Paul has been dedicated to figuring out what happened to him. Then a serial killer surrenders in the small town of Dread's Hand, Alaska – the same place Danny was last heard from. Paul, of course, heads to Alaska to start his own investigation, and discovers that something supernatural may be going on. The people of Dread's Hand tell stories of a devil who turns people "bone white" – poisons them from the inside, leaves them soulless and dangerous – and everyone, from the local cops to the hotel owner to the serial killer himself, is clearly helping to cover up whatever happened to Danny. This was an absolutely fantastic book. Malfi is not only a master at creating creeping tension, conveying the horror of absolute isolation, coming up with straight-up uncanny images, and just generally being scary, but his prose has a beauty that's rare in this genre. A few random examples of lines that struck me: Daylight broke like an arterial bleed. He could feel the slight increase in his heartbeat, and despite the cold that he’d carried in with him from the outside, a film of perspiration had come over him. He felt amphibious with it. Blink and you’d miss it: a town, or, rather, the memory of a town, secreted away at the end of a nameless, unpaved roadway that, in the deepening half light of an Alaskan dusk, looks like it might arc straight off the surface of the planet and out into the far reaches of the cosmos. A town where the scant few roads twist like veins and the little black-roofed houses, distanced from one another as if fearful of some contagion, look as if they’d been excreted into existence, pushed up through the crust of the earth from someplace deep underground. There is snow the color of concrete in the rutted streets, dirty clumps of it packed against the sides of houses or snared in the needled boughs of steel-colored spruce. No one walks the unpaved streets; no one putters around in those squalid little yards, where the soil looks like ash and the saplings all bend at curious, pained, aggrieved angles. And even farther still, he saw what appeared to be an impromptu landfill—a conglomeration of old washing machines, truck tires, TV antennas, and even an entire discarded swing set lay in a jumbled heap in the overgrown grass, like some beast that had succumbed to the elements and left its skeleton behind. Sure, it's not poetry, but it's a damn sight better than the workmanlike prose that I expected, and is a major part of why I loved this book. Another thing I adored was Jill Ryerson, investigator in Major Crimes Fairbank and the book's secondary narrator. Despite Paul and Jill being relatively the same age and both single... they never hook up! They never even waste time experiencing 'sexual tension'! They just get on with their jobs, interacting like two platonic professionals! DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE THIS IS? I was ecstatic when I realized that there wasn't going to be some dumb romantic subplot. Jill even gets this wonderfully un-feminized description when she fall ill at one point: "A whip of Kleenex corkscrewing from one nostril and a steaming mug of Theraflu on the counter, she’d listened to McHale’s voice in disbelief." There are complaints I could make about Bone White: there's a dumb recurring theme of powerful chakras, and the ending felt a little anticlimactic. But all of that is minor compared to the all-important trio of 1.) a genuinely scary book, with 2.) lovely writing, and 3.) well-written, competent female characters who are not there to be sexual foils for the male heroes. This is the first book I've read by Malfi, but I was incredibly impressed and will definitely be reading more. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. This is one of those books where just figuring out what the hell is going on takes until the end; they can be fun to read, but they're damn hard to review. So here's what we know: a significant portion of the southern US (I assumed, though now that I think about it, I believe the country is never actually specified) has been cordoned off by the government for decades and renamed "Area X". Exactly what happened to Area X – something supernatural? alien? environmental? disease-related? radioactive? – is either unknown or deliberately suppressed, but the only humans allowed into the area are small teams of explorers. Our unnamed narrator, known only as "the biologist", is a member of the twelfth expedition, along with three other women: the anthropologist, the surveyor, and their leader, the psychologist. All members of previous expeditions have died, either within Area X itself – whether of suicide or killed by other members of their team – or after returning, due to aggressive cancers. The biologist is meant to study the pristine wilderness created by humans having abandoned the area, but she slowly realizes that the act of observation is changing her as well, turning her into something that may not be quite human. Her past and her reasons for taking such a job are also slowly revealed. It's a short novel (about 130 pages), and though there's plenty of unsettling descriptions, we never do get a firm answer on what's going on with Area X or why any of this is happening. Annihilation reminded me a lot of House of Leaves. There's that same sense of the normal being made uncanny, though in this case it's swamps, a lighthouse, and dolphins with too-human eyes rather than a four-and-a-half minute hallway. Nor are there any explanations to be had, except in the vague sense of symbolism and the main character's psychology. Unfortunately, unlike House of Leaves the cryptic nature of Annihilation didn't quite work for me. I'm all for open endings, but when the characters, the plot, the setting, and the meaning are all vague as misty streaks on a cloudy night, I'm left with nothing to hang on to. It had some lovely descriptions of plants, I'll give it that. Invasive by Chuck Wendig. I asked for recs for scary reads over on twitter, and call_me_ishmael provided me with a list, of which I chose this one. There's a very simple reason for that: it's a horror novel about ants. A lot of people are creeped out by spiders. Me, I've never been able to stand ants. The shiny blackness of their surfaces, more like metal or plastic than any organic substance; the unnaturally sharp angles of their joints and segments; the flat reflectiveness of their eyes; the pointed mandibles in the base of their overly aerodynamic heads... it's wrong. Alien, robotic, monstrous – I'm not sure which, but they just don't seem like something from Earth. And so an entire book focusing on a creature that already makes me uncomfortable seemed like the perfect read for October. In a rural cabin in upstate New York, FBI consultant Hannah Stander is called to what may or may not be a crime scene. An unidentified body is found with its skin having been eaten by ants; the ants themselves were later killed off by a cold snap. Hannah and others at first assume the guy was probably dead before the ants arrived, but as they investigate further they discover the ants are of no known species. Or rather, they're of multiple species: the ants are genetically modified organisms combining the traits of many different kinds of ants to make them uniquely and viciously deadly. They possess a venom potent enough to paralyze a human with anaphylactic shock after a single sting, and they're drawn to harvest human skin for its yeast in much the same way leaf-cutter ants collect greenery to grow fungus. An investigation of their DNA finds markers tying the ants back to the company of an eccentric billionaire of the Richard Branson/Elon Musk type; he, of course, denies all involvement, but Hannah is invited to travel to his privately-owned island where his team of scientists do cutting-edge research. And where they are all horribly isolated when the ants break out. Hannah is a fantastic character to be the narrator of a horror novel. She suffers from panic attacks and has anxiety about everything – global warming, antibiotic resistant diseases, turbulence, etc – so her constant low-grade tension builds suspense before anything even happens. On the other hand, she was raised by off-the-grid doomsday prepper parents, so when the shit hits the fan she has the training and drive to survive the end of the world. She's complex, likable, and flawed, and I enjoyed spending time with her. Invasive is apparently a sequel to Wendig's Zer0es, but there is relatively little overlap between the two (Hannah, for example, seems to be new for this book), so I had no problem reading it as a stand-alone. I do have a few complaints: the section of the book between the first death and before the ants are released is pretty slow-going, as Hannah just wanders around interviewing scientists and contemplating who might be lying. But once swarms of ants are covering the island, things kick up to such a high gear that all that boring stage-setting is redeemed. Secondly, the ultimate reveal of who made the ants and why wasn't satisfactory. Still, the horror genre as a whole can almost never stick their landings, so I suppose I can't hold it against Invasive too much. Overall, this was the perfect horror techno-thriller: exciting, gross, and cheesy in just the right amounts. The Wishing Tree by Aline Hannigan. I'm pretty certain I bought this because it was written by a fanfic author I enjoy, but of course now I can't remember whose penname it is, so maybe I was mistaken about that. Anyway. In this novella, Theodora Miller – expert in weird supernatural shit – is called from her home in East Harlem to a small New Hampshire town suffering from a plague of mysterious murders. They seem to be connected to the 'wishing tree', an old oak in the nearby forest that local folklore has caused to be carved with the initials of every resident. Also, it turns out that there's a deadline: Theodora has only a few days to solve the case before the entire town will be destroyed. The Wishing Tree suffers from a few minor grammar mistakes (though if the author was one of you, let me know and I'm happy to do a beta), but overall I liked the inventiveness of the mystery and its resolution. There's a twist at the end that nicely ties up the plot, the creepiness of the scenario is well-developed, and both Theodora and the local sheriff were interesting, effective characters. Fifty pages doesn't give one much room to build up the world, but I see the author plans to write the further adventures of Theodora and that could make for a very promising series. It kept me engaged despite reading it on a turbulent flight, and what more can humanity really ask for from our greatest literature?

[DW link for ease of commenting]

[threeclaws]

V A R I O U S . D R A B B L E . A U S .

@claradox asked: 6~

06. Victorian AU.

        monstrum: noun, latin // A sign or portent that disrupts the natural order as evidence of divine displeasure

        The pollution hit James’ nose long before the shoreline was spotted on the horizon, and it was precisely what stirred him from fitful sleep. One misery to another, in typical fashion. Something popped and creaked as he pushed himself into a sitting position, and he winced at the feeling of bones pressing on his flesh inside his arms. Usually a postured sleeper, he’d grown accustomed to sleeping on his side, curled around, holding- and, well, an empty bed did make for fitful sleep, didn’t it?

        He dressed for work, despite knowing he’d be useless until they reached the harbour. Despite all his advantages over the usual labourer, he faltered at the sight of water. Circumstances of the past had proven that he could swim. However, there was something about the deep water that unnerved James. Every time he spent too long watching the tide, he felt all too aware of his flesh, as if there was a heaviness inside him that would make him merely an anchor in the sea. His tasks aboard the ship remained internal. Repairs, menial cleaning - settling fights spurred by cabin fever. Still though, it was hardly a competent mop job that had enticed the employers to take James across the sea. Once they made port, they would journey into London, where the real work began.

        For now, there was the looming dawn - the darkness faded to a vague, monotone blue. As opposed to the empty void, the borderless connection between the air above and the water below, he could see the contrast on the tide. As he needlessly meandered along the deck, he kept an eye out for land, the scent of it still heavy in his nose. If it was bad now, he couldn’t possibly imagine the wretchedness of a city as busy as London. Those who’d visited had insisted the smog was like no other, unable to tell the exhaust from the clouds. But then again, those who’d preached that were New Yorkers, and he doubted that their bias hadn’t blinded them of their own city’s rot.

        He didn’t dare wander too close to the railing, knowing if he looked over to the waves right underneath him, it’d stir up panic. However, lingering right by the hallways meant he was passing by the doorway to the guest cabins when it swung wide open, knocking right into him. With a grumble, James rubbed at his forehead, peeking under his hand at his attacker.

        The little girl merely stared up at him, wide eyed at the sight of anyone else up this early. He recognized her - of course he did. She was with the Hudson party, affluent passengers with plans for Poole. Despite being the older of the two young girls, this one was the smallest passenger aboard.

        James grumbled, “What are you doing? It’s too early to be awake.”

        Quite eloquently, the girl raised her shoulder and dropped it. She turned away from him, disinterested in his scolding. She wandered towards the railing, and he finally noticed that she was still in her nightie.

        “Hey,” he said, but she ignored him, instead clambering onto the first bar so she could poke her head out over the railing. Sharply, he repeated himself, “Hey!”

        With a frustrated sigh, he crossed the deck to tug her down, but stopped short to grimace at the waves as they washed mercilessly against the side of the boat. The little girl set her arms on the railing, putting her chin on her hands. Perhaps it was his frustration at getting so close to the side that clouded his vision, but he could’ve sworn when she twisted her head up to look at him, there was an amused gleam in her eye. He glowered, and swept his hands under her armpits to set her back down on the ground.

        “Go back to bed, pup.”

        The girl batted her big eyes, looking ready to protest - but then the door opened, and James Hudson poked his head outside. He was half-dressed, preparing for an early morning before he realized that one of the little ones was missing from her bed. He glanced between the pair of them, before he beckoned for her to come back inside.

        “Come along, sweetheart. It’s not yet morning.”

        She sniffed, but reluctantly listened, shuffling along in her bare feet to be herded back inside. Hudson patted her shoulder as she passed him, gently encouraging her along. About to follow her back to make sure she did indeed to return to her chambers, he stopped and caught the door before it closed. Hudson inclined his head; James returned the action.

        “My thanks, Jim.”

        “Of course.”

        A navy ship had docked ahead, and the spectacle upon their arrival was a sight to behold. The soldiers gave a parade down the gangplank, out onto the streets - they’d march all the way to the barracks, or to accompany their prized passenger to his residence. Governors and princes and rich men - they’re all rather the same, and the show was a spoil to their inflated ego.  However, as despicable and redundant as it was, the display was exactly what had led their vessel to be docked at this precise location, at this precise time. They’d hardly pulled into the port before men were swinging down to the wooden boards, unpacking before the harbourmaster could get a good look. The first mate was already bumbling down the way to distract the man in question. By the time he’d return for an inspection of the ship, any unsavoury cargo would be long gone.

        James hardly had a chance to revel in the steady ground under his feet before he was being knocked upside the head and ordered to his tasks. Biting back the growl that longed to linger on the back of his tongue, he straightened himself up and began his work. Twenty-two trunks were his load; back and forth he went, freighting the cargo from the ship’s hold to the carriage that awaited them. He glanced to the plank, watching as the captain assisted a white-eyed woman down the steps. She was passed along to the coachman, who escorted her to the carriage. She stepped up with the footman’s assistance, carefully instructed to duck her head. Like most underlings, he’d assumed - or, hoped - that he’d be ignored. But despite the blurred, unseeing pale irises, the woman suddenly pulled back and looked at James.

        Or through him.

        There was a long moment, in which he remained still. He wanted to meet the eyes of his peers, unsure of how to proceed when confronted by his employers’ guest. But she had him in a curious trance, so much so that when she spoke, it startled him.

        “You’ll need to strap that one down.”

        Before James could even process what was said at all, or even attempt to retort, the woman had disappeared into the carriage, settling against the seat by the far window. With a frown, he reluctantly returned to his task. Searching for another’s gaze was useless; the other men were as perplexed as he. There was little to do but to lift the last of the trunks.

        “Any troubles, lad?” one of the men asked, but he adamantly shook his head.

        “Fine. Move along, I’ll be done here,” he said. As if to prove his point, he managed to get the baggage atop the pile. He gave the side of the carriage a pat, calling up to the driver, “All set. Passengers loaded?”

        “Yesser, all packed in, like sardines in a can. Best hop up, we’ll be headin’ off.”

        In no temperament nor motivation to disobey, he moved to the back of the carriage, grabbing the top with a slight hop and swinging himself up onto the back platform. In the front, the horses lurched into action under the crack of their master’s whip. The coach’s wheels were mere centimeters from taking his feet as he pulled up. With a strangled groan, he moved his feet just in time, balancing with his hands on the seat. James looked over the top of the carriage, incredulous. The driver didn’t turn away from the glare, not until he’d made eye contact and finally shrugged.

        “Quick little colonist.” The driver mused, as if his intent all along had been to maim him.

        He carefully eased into his seat, his arm pulled back to the top of the coach. “Let us hope your horses are just as swift. The sooner we arrive in London, the sooner I’ll settle.”

        A swift exit from the city gave way to the constance of country. It just went to show the distrust one ought to have of New Yorkers, as their tales of flat, disappointing farmland were untrue. Granted, the green wasn’t as vibrant as it ought to be, shades of yellow in the grass that showed signs of malnutrition. It’d soon be in for a treat, however. The forestorm winds that had swept them into the harbour were following their party far along the road, bringing with a legion of clouds that had remained just far enough to avoid falling on them. It was as if a little fall of rain had developed a sheepish demeanor. It would be enough to revitalize the countryside. He had a vague sense of nationality to this motherland, impressed by the sights of rolling hills and high trees that crowded the road.

        But, with a heavy pang of disappointment, it wasn’t home. Even as early on in this endeavour he knew as much. It was a shame, but he resolved to make an effort to burrow into this country nonetheless. He’d made plans to settle in London, with this new and lucrative employment, and damn all, settle he would. Be it as it may to be in typical fashion of him to ignore the omens that came his way. He turned back to watch the clouds chase them, still far in the distance when a shadow fell over them. Frowning a moment, he turned his head to crane back, watching as tall trees crowded the path, effectively blocking out the sun. The horses whinnied in complaint, but they were whipped to continue ahead.

        Again, he was the sort to ignore omens. External warnings were all too simply waved off; it was the ones that came from within, the phantom hands that twist your gut, that were difficult to ignore. And his stomach turned then, a sense of dread for something terrible. He realized that he recognized a stiffness in the shoulders of the driver, as he peered over the top of the carriage. Suddenly untrusting of the man’s competence in guiding, he scooted to the end of his bench, maintaining a sure grip on the top post as he leaned over and looked ahead.

        Only at the last second did he hold his tongue, cutting off any curses that may have been overheard by any conservative passengers. Up ahead, he could see large roots that’d come up from the earth, well in the path of the oncoming carriage. He winced, realizing that the driver’s attention would have to be spared to getting free of the untamed wood in one piece - and he’d have to be the bearer of bad news. He swung himself around, finding an unsteady footing as he reached out to knock on the door.

        It opened to the pale-eyed woman, looking a few inches to the right but keeping a pleasant expression.

        “Quite curious to receive a knock on a moving coach, no?” she bantered.

        “Just a warning to you and your fellow passengers,” he explained shortly, trying to remain cordial without showing his frustrations, “up ahead we do have some uneasy road, the ride may be uneasy.”

        “Isn’t it always!” she crowed, merely laughing at him. The others inside joined her, and she waved a hand towards him, “It’s quite commonplace, my dear. I must say, we were remarking earlier how impressed we were at the smooth ride so far.”

        He looked ahead again, still focused on the tension of the driver’s back. The man was hired for this - he was an experienced man who’d surely been through these paths hundreds of times. If this was as truly commonplace as the woman insisted, would he not be at ease even in the face of this sort of challenge?

        Phantom hands remained steadfast inside him. James locked his jaw, and started to nod carefully in return to the woman, before he realized himself. Hastily, he cleared his throat, and started to pull himself back.

        “Of course. Sorry, I’ll… let you return to your pleasant ride. Ma’am.”

        Still humming out a chuckle, she shut the door, but not before he heard her saying across the passengers’ cab to another, “An interesting catch, that Mr. Howlett-”

        He paused, both hands on the top post, his foot still reaching for the back platform once more. For anyone, it was bound to be unsettling. For him, a man who would be unrecognizable if he wasn’t unsettled on some level, the fact that she could issue his name was outright alarming. James’ head turned to the cab door, and he had half a mind to push himself forward once more and demand how she’d gained such knowledge. Exactly how close were she and his employer, that the latter had revealed as much as his name? What else did she know?

        It was an omen. Perhaps best to ignore. With that final dismissal, he sighed at his own paranoia, and his arms started to pull himself back onto his seat.

        Then they hit the first root, and the coach’s front wheels took air. The animals yelped and nickered, and the driver yelled as he attempted to regain control. His hands slipped on their post, and his feet flew out before he slammed back into the carriage. Upon impact, he groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to brace against the pain so he didn’t lose his grip. But his eyes snapped back open once more at the sound of crashing, as the trunks piled below the platform jumped and banged against one another in the luggage rack. He only realized what he was watching when it was too late; the cases all jumped and slid, but it was the one he’d pushed atop that fell clean off. It was on the road, and the carriage was speeding on, putting distance between them rapidly.

        The twenty-third trunk was about to be lost forever.

        “NO!” he cried, adjusting his grip to hook his elbow to the top post. Hanging on only by his arms, his head whirled around to shout out to the driver, “STOP THE COACH! STOP IT NOW!”

        “I can’t slow them down now, they’re panicked! We’ll have to keep on until they tire!” the driver hollered back, but that wasn’t enough.

        “It’s my luggage!”

        “Oh for Heaven’s-” the man twisted in his seat to throw his arm up in the air, “I am not turning around for your personal affairs, blast you!”

        “WE HAVE TO TURN BACK.”

        “If you want it that bloody much, you hop off,” the driver snarled, already turning back around. Unfinished with his beratement, however, he lifted a finger to the air, “But you’ll lose it! You’ll lose your ticket to London, mark my words! On we-”

        He’d twisted back around… only to find no one hanging on.

        “... Go?”

        Already far behind, James lay directly on the border where dirt road met the grass, curling around his swelling elbow. It didn’t take a master practitioner of the medical arts to see that he’d broken his arm clean in half; the bone was sticking out from the skin. Or rather, bones. It was a rare injury for him to splinter the three bones that remained hidden from the world, but along with his radius forearm, the claws stuck out close to the juncture of his elbow. He hissed and moaned, but already was attempting to push himself to his feet. There was pain in his leg, but nothing as dramatic as the arm. The broken bones were the most significant injury - and he could walk with a practically obliterated arm. Trusting that the distance already put between himself and the coach was enough, he stood up and raced towards where the trunk remained.

        He slammed to his knees beside it, rolling the front around so he could undo the clasps, shove up the lid and inspect his cargo.

        Laura Howlett, James Hudson’s ward, sniffed - and whimpered unabashed when the sound made her nose shift. In the tumble, her head had slammed forward, crushing her nose against the inside of the trunk. Her father cursed quietly, and lifted his hands to cradle her face.

        “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry-” James apologized, over and over. Her hands clutched at his sleeves, bloodying the jacket. He didn’t have the energy to particularly care - not even when her eyes went wide at the sight of his bones sliding back into place inch by godawful inch.

        “You’re hurt.”

        “You’re hurt,” he repeated back. With a hand on her chin, he made her lift her head, tilting it from side to side so he could inspect from all angles. “I shouldn’t have taken you this far, we can’t make it to London like this. You should have stayed in New York-”

        “No!” she protested adamantly, and as if to prove her point, punched at his shoulders, “No, no! ¡Quiero quedarme!”

        “Basta!” he snapped back, “Don’t fight me, Laura. Let me see now-”

        She yelped as he corrected her nose, but soon enough it was healed, with only the blood to prove there had ever been a fracture. His arm shifted back into place with a nasty, audible snap of ligaments. He started shifting around her, reaching to pull up a fresh jacket to cover the blood. He also started to arrange the clothes - both his large, heavy shirts and her small, posh dresses - around so any further jostling would be cushioned, like an odd nest.

        “We shouldn’t-”

        Laura stopped him, pronouncing carefully, "London. You said we would go to London, and we will go to London. I don't want to go back to where..."

        He'd opened his mouth to protest, but as she carefully dropped her gaze, suddenly unwilling to finish her sentence, he had to stop and merely sigh. It was a conversation they'd had before, a conversation they'd agreed upon. If not London, then not there. The loss was still a fresh wound for both. Even with their mysterious abilities, passed on from father to daughter, it was a pain that would not yet soon heal. The farmhouse that had been home for so long was a stark reminder of their loss.

        If not there, then London - that was the conversation they'd had before.

        They could have continued on alone. He knew they could. The two of them could have simply walked to London this way. But the only way they'd have made it this far was the route they'd already taken, and that came with strings. This route had come with a job offer that simply could not be refused. His employer was generous enough to take him on, pay for a ticket across the sea... But only one ticket. As generous as he was, he was frivolous, and only wanted loyal labourers under his care. He did not take kindly to men who turned their backs on him.

        It was a fool who double-crossed him. To break a promise with the man and then wander right into the same city he'd be working out of, it was to sign your own death certificate.

        No. If they wished to journey to London, it had to be under Nathaniel Essex's care.

        They had to get back on that carriage.

        He looked at the coach fading in the distance, then back to Laura. The same resolution in mind. It was always as such with the pair of them, wasn’t it? Two minds, linked through the wretched curse of their legacy, but perhaps more. Two souls, dependent on one another. Long ago, he’d promised his wife - as she cradled their sweet infant to her breast, singing lullabies passed from her mother and her grandmother before that - that Laura would be before all else. Perhaps down the line, Laura had made much the same promise to her mother in regards to him. They knew each other intrinsically. They both had an understanding of the other’s plans before it was even spoken. It didn’t need to be.

        James fixed his jacket. Laura reached up, grabbing the inside of the trunk’s lid, and slowly lowered it on herself. James locked the latches. Laura adjusted, ensuring for his concern that she wouldn’t be tossed about. James lifted the trunk, up onto his back. Laura breathed, and he could hear it through the thin metal. She’d spoken on the exhale, putting every ounce of trust into him.

        “Corras.”

        And he started to run, at first so used to keeping appearances that it wasn’t enough. No human could catch up with a horse-drawn stagecoach, tossing and turning in the root-riddled road.

        But he wasn’t human, was he?

        James Howlett was not a man, but a monster. A demon. And he could make it to the carriage.

        Onwards he pushed himself, faster and faster, until he was matching the speed of the horses, then overcoming it, rapidly pulling ahead until the carriage was upon them. With a huff, preparing himself for the exertion he was about to put himself through, he remained apace. One, two, three long strides. And then, heaving the trunk forward, it landed with a clatter on the back platform - and with a pounce, he followed.

        The commotion made the driver turn around, and he was startled to see James’ head rise over the top of the carriage again.

        “Bloody hell!” he cursed, “I thought you fell off!”

        James, trying to catch his breath and seem casual, shrugged, “Almost. Hangin’ on by a thread, with your shit driving. Only just climbed back on. Watch it next time, got it?”

        Before there was any further baffled protest from the driver, he turned back, slumping against the back of the cab. The trunk sat beside him, but he didn’t bother to place it back under to the luggage rack. He simply hugged it to his side, the corners awkward against his legs and his gut. Onwards they would go, until tall trees became stone, and the roots underfoot became the desperate and reaching beggars’ hands; until London came to introduce herself, like sickness welcomes itself at home in living flesh.

        All omens of trouble ahead may as well be disregarded; the storm had finally caught up with the travelling party, and it began to rain overhead.

        Fair enough on New Yorkers, the smog of London had no contenders for the most miserable air James had ever encountered. It wasn’t merely the pollution. Something rotted in the city. Perhaps it was all the politics, so much corruption that it left a tangible stench. But despite the overarching buildings, indeed as high forest branches, they didn’t enclose their space. Even as he took the directions down to the row of flats that would house him (and his secret companion), James was uncrowded by the narrow streets. It was nothing more and nothing less than what he’d seen in America, if not a little more composed in its history. Americans were fascinated with turning the wheel - the English had invented the wheel, played for many a century, and already their interest waned.

        The flats themselves were Georgian in make, though that was more out of lack of care to renovate versus a certain pride in showcasing older architecture. What would have been an impressive and affluent street upon its building had faded with time. Right at the end, he could spot a hostel. But the street was bordered by a central garden square, which gave the decrepit neighbourhood a charming look.

        Sarah would have adored it.

        James shouldered on down the road, careful not to meet the eyes of his neighbours (for the time being). If it was a place he would live, that meant the men around here were as good as him; that is to say, they were not terribly trustworthy. He called judgement upon the landlady once he knocked on the door. As she led him up the stairs to his floor, he even double checked his pockets with her back turned. Still, he thanked her shortly and made her quickly retreat once he remarked that he would be changing out of his journey-worn clothes. With a distasteful sniff, she’d stuck her nose in the air, collected her shawl close around her, and went to slam the door behind her.

        He went to do the locks behind her, and finally released Laura from the entrapment of his trunk. She made an exaggerated gasp of air, stretching out her sore, stiff limbs. He chuckled at her theatrics, reaching down to pull her out and set her on her feet.

        “Tired?” he asked. She hummed in return, shaking her head.

        “Hungry, then?” he asked, knowing it was the right question. She hummed in return, nodding adamantly.

        Of course. Bemused but charmed by her giddiness, he nodded - they would try to find something. They had nothing stored yet in their cabinets, so out they would venture.

        It took little effort on the man’s part to slip the little girl down the stairwell and out onto the street. For a block, James insisted that they remain separate, but once he was convinced they were out of sight of any watchful snitches, Laura was immediately by his side again, clinging to his hand. She took to making herself a nuisance, swinging his arm dramatically. He remained dutiful to his task of seeming bemused, with long sighs and stern shakes of his head, but the truth was that he hadn’t seen Laura in such high spirits since long before they’d climbed aboard the ship. She hadn’t been able to take a look at their new abode, given that she’d still been hiding in their luggage, but now that she was free, the little girl was enraptured by every sight, sound, and smell. The main streets were a constant struggle of tugging Laura away from the con artists and street performers, distracted by bright fabrics and flying ribbons.

        “Mira, papa, mira!” she’d exclaim, pointing out toys set up in window displays. She let go of his hand only to dart right over, her feet on a step to press her nose against the glass. James sighed, pushing past two businessmen to tug at her hand.

        “Food.”

        “Papa!”

        “Laura,” he warned, and she reluctantly stepped down, mumbling darkly in the language her mother had shared with her. He elected not to make the effort to translate in his mind, and started to lead the way down a sideroad. While a stranger to London, companions of the past were not, and there was always the recommendations. As it was told to him, the neighbourhood was unsavoury, but the regular attendants would be friendly to the likes of the Howletts. He wasn’t terribly concerned about Laura’s wellbeing. He was beside her, and experience had already taught them both that they made a formidable team.

        There were worse things in London than a rowdy bunch of drunkards.

        True to his old friends’ word, a sign advertising The Rose & Crown hung not far up ahead as he made the turn off the main road onto Trap Street. The cobblestoned path was too narrow for those impressive vehicles, but still wide enough to highlight the seemingly broad emptiness. The only person was an old, haggard man, sitting on one of the stoops and puffing away at a pipe. He eyed them with a bit of a sneer. Perhaps, if it wasn’t them, it may have frightened off any other. But James merely grasped Laura’s hand and tugged on her harder; she was starting to snarl back.

        Approaching the inn made for a remarkable contrast. Even outside, the clamour was audible, and warm light shone through the windows that depicted bright and humoured folk. All of them particularly shabby, though like most after a drink or two, not seeming to particularly mind. James held the door open for Laura, and she led the way - infallible exuberance replaced by a cool, observant look as she studied the strangers around them. He gave her a nudge, guiding her towards an empty table - one where he could keep his back to a wall and his eyes on the room.

        “Well well well, it’s not every day someone walks in here littler than me.”

        James’ was shedding his coat when the voice spoke. He didn’t startle, yet turned with a suspicious look. He knew himself an intimidating man, yet there wasn’t a single falter in the glint in brown eyes. The barmaid only spared him a smile, dimpled where it quirked to the side, and she turned her attention back to the person she’d been speaking to in the first place: Laura.

        “You, sweetie, look very pretty today. And hungry.”

        Laura had a perplexed look on her face, conflicted between indifference and giddiness. Of course, she was her father’s daughter and they thrived on their levels of intimidation, but it was plain to see that she was immediately charmed by the barmaid. She finally gave in, and nodded adamantly in agreement.

        “Just get us started with a drink. Two standards.” James said shortly, uninterested in exposing Laura to any lengthy conversation. He was already disregarding the barmaid, settling down with a grumble. But she hadn’t moved an inch, merely let her eyes slide over to him with a certain look. Not distaste, and certainly not fear. But there was a slight to her expression that made her suddenly seem adversarial. Without even moving her head, she flipped out the menu in her hand to hold it out to Laura.

        “You take a gander and I’ll get back to you.” She turned to Laura with a warm smile, and gave her a wink before leaving for the back. Laura clambered into her seat with a newfound burst of energy, poorly smothering her smile when her father frowned at her. He took the chair across, crossing his arms where he leaned on the table.

        “Ella es bonita.” Laura pointed out.

        “Ai, Laura,”James shot back, his roving gaze snapping back to send her his scolding look, “Fácil. Mantén tu cabeza abajo, si?”

        “Papito.”

        “Hija.”

        Laura wrinkled her nose and growled, before hiding behind the paper that’d been given to her. James huffed out a laugh at her attempt at having the last word, and returned to his careful scope of the room. The little girl quickly became disinterested in the words in front of her and mimicked him, craning her head towards the kitchen, where the back door had been left open. She tilted her head curiously, but James disregarded her behaviour until a huge gasp came from her.

        “What?” he asked impatiently.

        Still searching for the right words, she grunted and pointed.

        “Papa, she disappeared!”

        James sighed, lurching up to lean his elbows against the table as he started on one of his well-worn lectures, “Laura-”

        “Wotcher sweetie, two standards!”

        He fell back just in time to avoid the mug that came skidding in front of him. Laura’s tiny hands leaped forward to catch hers in time. Her eyes went wide, and flickered quickly up. Laura, who could be so calm and cautious and wary, absolutely beamed in pure, childish delight. He only frowned. Just like before, it didn’t seem to faze the barmaid.

        After a moment of glaring, he had to ask, “How’d you do that so fast?”

        “Ah,” she said, eyes sparkling - damn it, she was just waiting for him to bring up the very question.”Well, you take the time, you’d be surprised how quick things get done.”

        “Ella es como nosotros.”

        James’ gaze snapped back to Laura, but he didn’t scold. He didn’t glare. She knew what it would mean to say that. She knew that weight. Once more, the recommendation for the Rose & Crown came to mind, how the regular attendants would be friendly to the likes of the Howletts. It couldn’t have possibly meant- ella es como nosostros.

        She’s like us.

        The barmaid never batted an eyelash, only watched, patiently awaiting a response. He doubted she spoke, but there was something that knew. Could she get in their heads? Had she been following them? Did she know who they had come with? Expressionless, holding his breath, he took her in - really looked for the first time, every inch of her taking equal regard. Finally, he reached out, taking the mug in hand. He brought it to his lips, and just before taking a gulp, he gave one question.

                        “So, what do you know about mutants?”

[flauntpage]

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

Over the next two months VICE Sports will be profiling 16 athletes as they evolve into national superstars. Keep checking back here to find them all.

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda's father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia's father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. "I mean, yeah it was hard," Mejia says of moving away from his family, "because I'm a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like."

Mejia spent a couple years training in South Florida, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. "On the court, he's a gladiator," Mateus said. "If he can chew you alive, he's going to do it."

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Eddie Herr, a prestigious youth competition. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon's main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy's overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it's fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy's physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri's original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy's amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it's now dotted with oversized maps telling you that "YOU ARE HERE."

All in all, tuition and expenses cost upwards of $70,000 per year (the Academy offers limited need-based financial aid; a spokesperson for the Academy declined to offer specifics such as how many students receive financial aid or how much the average aid package is). While IMG also runs a massive sports management agency that looms large over professional tennis, it seems that more than anything else, the Academy functions as a standalone enterprise to create a sporting oasis for whomever is willing to pay for it. In addition to the school, the Academy hosts professional athletes for off-season training programs, pro teams passing through, and some international youth tournaments.

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes' needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls "the last mile" or "the point of break." In other words, it's his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Mateus believes the traveling tennis lifestyle is its own form of education, albeit a very different one from a traditional high school. Young players experience a wide variety of cultures, and have to learn to be responsible in many different foreign countries. They learn a lot about their own bodies, the human anatomy, about nutrition and chemistry to ensure they adhere to the strict and confusing anti-doping guidelines of high-level tennis. Mateus also teaches his athletes to manage their finances, file expense reports, enact time-management techniques, and other practical lessons most kids are lucky to master by the time they graduate college, to say nothing of high school.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn't playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he'd play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

"Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls," Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families' lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, "the process."

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can't, or don't want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. "We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16," Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. "He had a period of two, three months," says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms "the real side," the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. "Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We're very happy about it. Happy for him," he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew's privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia's father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father's death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it's been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship "actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he's doing. He's filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live." For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father's death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he's doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they're still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia's family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he's made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was "one of the best moves I've made because here she has everything that she needs." In her eyes, the place is like "Disneyland for athletes."

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn't come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be "orange from head to toe" by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn't long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: "Mom, I'm going to play there, I'm going to win that, and I'm going to win it many times, and I'm going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike." She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia's best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter's tennis career?

"I decided it was a chance I had to take with her," Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn't bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: "Whenever I want this more than you do, that's the moment when I'm going to stop supporting you."

Edward Linsmier

This conundrum is not unique to Arango and her mother. For every teenage tennis player trying to make the jump from the youth circuit to the professional level, there is a family that must give up any semblance of a typical life. That athlete, in turn, must give up any semblance of being a normal kid.

A decade later, Arango's dream hasn't wavered, and some of it has even come true––she's sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, "sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom's like, 'Come on!' We're like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] 'You're seriously going to stay in bed?'" To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. "So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on."

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she's too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey's Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. "I'll text and Snapchat or whatever" when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. "I'm not, like, 'Hey, let's call and talk to each other,'" she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. "Like, my mom doesn't Snapchat and doesn't understand. 'Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?'," she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. "She'll text her sister and say, 'Hey I've got something to tell you,' and her sister answers 'OK' and then they'll call. But it's, like, why would you call me?"

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they've missed out on the critical stage in every person's life where they're given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They're tennis players.

"If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless," Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. "I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he's like a neighbor. He'll drop off my rackets so I don't actually have to pick them up."

"I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided," Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. "There's no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things." Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn't quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she's rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, "Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career."

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. "I don't know," she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn't, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that's why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. "She's passionate about it," her mother will tell me later. "I think she was born for this."

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

What Life Is Like at ‘Disneyland for Athletes’

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda’s father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia’s father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. “I mean, yeah it was hard,” Mejia says of moving away from his family, “because I’m a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like.”

Mejia spent a couple years training at Club Med Tennis Academy, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. “On the court, he’s a gladiator,” Mateus said. “If he can chew you alive, he’s going to do it.”

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Orange Bowl, a prestigious youth competition hosted in Miami. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon’s main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy’s overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it’s fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy’s physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri’s original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy’s amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it’s now dotted with oversized maps telling you that “YOU ARE HERE.”

All in all, tuition and expenses cost upwards of $70,000 per year (the Academy offers limited need-based financial aid; a spokesperson for the Academy declined to offer specifics such as how many students receive financial aid or how much the average aid package is). While IMG also runs a massive sports management agency that looms large over professional tennis, it seems that more than anything else, the Academy functions as a standalone enterprise to create a sporting oasis for whomever is willing to pay for it. In addition to the school, the Academy hosts professional athletes for off-season training programs, pro teams passing through, and some international youth tournaments.

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes’ needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls “the last mile” or “the point of break.” In other words, it’s his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Mateus believes the traveling tennis lifestyle is its own form of education, albeit a very different one from a traditional high school. Young players experience a wide variety of cultures, and have to learn to be responsible in many different foreign countries. They learn a lot about their own bodies, the human anatomy, about nutrition and chemistry to ensure they adhere to the strict and confusing anti-doping guidelines of high-level tennis. Mateus also teaches his athletes to manage their finances, file expense reports, enact time-management techniques, and other practical lessons most kids are lucky to master by the time they graduate college, to say nothing of high school.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn’t playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he’d play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

“Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls,” Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families’ lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, “the process.”

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can’t, or don’t want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. “We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16,” Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. “He had a period of two, three months,” says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms “the real side,” the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. “Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We’re very happy about it. Happy for him,” he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew’s privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia’s father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father’s death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it’s been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship “actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he’s doing. He’s filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live.” For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father’s death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he’s doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they’re still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia’s family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he’s made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was “one of the best moves I’ve made because here she has everything that she needs.” In her eyes, the place is like “Disneyland for athletes.”

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn’t come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be “orange from head to toe” by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn’t long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: “Mom, I’m going to play there, I’m going to win that, and I’m going to win it many times, and I’m going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike.” She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia’s best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter’s tennis career?

“I decided it was a chance I had to take with her,” Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn’t bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: “Whenever I want this more than you do, that’s the moment when I’m going to stop supporting you.”

Edward Linsmier

This conundrum is not unique to Arango and her mother. For every teenage tennis player trying to make the jump from the youth circuit to the professional level, there is a family that must give up any semblance of a typical life. That athlete, in turn, must give up any semblance of being a normal kid.

A decade later, Arango’s dream hasn’t wavered, and some of it has even come true––she’s sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, “sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom’s like, ‘Come on!’ We’re like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] ‘You’re seriously going to stay in bed?'” To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. “So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on.”

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she’s too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. “I’ll text and Snapchat or whatever” when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. “I’m not, like, ‘Hey, let’s call and talk to each other,'” she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. “Like, my mom doesn’t Snapchat and doesn’t understand. ‘Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?’,” she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. “She’ll text her sister and say, ‘Hey I’ve got something to tell you,’ and her sister answers ‘OK’ and then they’ll call. But it’s, like, why would you call me?”

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they’ve missed out on the critical stage in every person’s life where they’re given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They’re tennis players.

“If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless,” Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. “I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he’s like a neighbor. He’ll drop off my rackets so I don’t actually have to pick them up.”

“I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided,” Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. “There’s no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things.” Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn’t quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she’s rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, “Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career.”

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. “I don’t know,” she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn’t, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that’s why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. “She’s passionate about it,” her mother will tell me later. “I think she was born for this.”

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: “I mean, I wouldn’t know. I mean, what I would do.”

What Life Is Like at ‘Disneyland for Athletes’ syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/10/washington-post-i-feel-betrayed-redskins-fans-erupt-in-fury-after-latest-reports-of-front-office-dysfunction-17/

Washington Post: ‘I feel betrayed': Redskins fans erupt in fury after latest reports of front office dysfunction

Two fans at the end of the last Redskins season. (Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

John Hunter Biebighauser follows politics, votes regularly, and keeps up with current events, but he had never signed a petition in his 33 years. That changed Wednesday night.

The cause that finally nudged him into put-your-name-on-the-line activism? Anger at Redskins President Bruce Allen, at the team’s chaotic front office and at the apparent ouster of beloved General Manager Scot McCloughan. Wait, really?

“It felt pretty stupid, to be honest … but I think they might actually read it, because they care so much about their image,” Biegbighauser said in a phone conversation late Wednesday night. And why now?

[A Redskins-McCloughan separation seems to be a question of when, not if]

“They’ve been an embarrassment for going on 20-plus years,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. But it’s actually having something that appears to be good go away.”

That’s the easiest way to explain why Redskins fans detonated Wednesday night. Their fragile faith in this team had been patched together not just by the barely winning records of the past two seasons, but by the idea that a competent football man was running the organization — free from petty interference and the drama of the past. The Post’s blockbuster exhumation of the past few months, published Wednesday night, seems to have blown away the last wisps of that faith. For many, raw fury was left behind.

An online petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power,” launched late Wednesday afternoon, had more than 1,900 signatures by Thursday morning. A Redditor urged fans to bombard the Redskins with phone calls of protest. Some fans began organizing a Friday morning “March on Ashburn.” A popular Redskins blogger posted purported contact information for Allen. By Thursday morning, the Junkies on 106.7 The Fan were brainstorming ideas to tap into this anger, including creating a Bruce Allen piñata and inviting fans to “come down here and beat the hell out of it,” as host Eric Bickel proposed.

“Fill it with lies,” John Auville suggested.

Another host said the station could host a mini-circus inside its studios. Fans, a producer noted, could “get their faces painted with disappointment.”

This all sounds like hyperbole, and maybe it is. But I spent Wednesday night talking to random Redskins fans on the phone. They were almost distraught.

“I feel betrayed,” said Michael Pettiford, a season ticket holder the past six years who said there’s now a 5 percent chance he renews. “I mean, it’s an embarrassment, and I just can’t financially support it anymore. … They made a good hire with Scot McCloughan. But if they’re not going to let him operate, there’s no point in thinking the team’s going to be good. And you just can’t support it.”

dont think ive ever seen the fan base this riled up

this might be rock bottom

— Eric Bickel (@EBJunkies) March 9, 2017

Look, I’ve spent way too much of my life writing about angry D.C. sports fans. Sometimes — remember the start to this Wizards season — the angst later seems overblown. The team rallies, mistakes are corrected (or turn out not to have been mistakes), and the anger dissipates. That’s certainly possible here. And I’ve obviously sought out frustrated voices, because they’re the loudest and most quotable. But there’s a level of bleakness here you don’t really expect to find among NFL fans in early March.

[If you’re sick of the Redskins’ chaos, maybe it’s time to start following the Wizards]

“There was something about being a season ticket holder that made me feel like I was being a really good fan,” wrote Chris Wooden in an email. “When I went through my divorce or was laid off from my job, it was a sanctuary for me. I love hanging with the people I sit near and tailgate with. I love the atmosphere, even when half the fans are from the other team.”

Now? He also said he’s 95 percent sure that he’s done, even if he might still buy tickets on the secondary market. And he’s trying to encourage other season ticket holders to post their displeasure — and their account numbers — on social media, to show the front office that they’re real and they’re serious.

“I do know that the team does listen and feels embarrassed,” he wrote. ” I feel this is the only way that as fans we can show Snyder that we are not an open bank [and] will not keep spending money on a dysfunctional product.”

Thursday morning, I got a call from Kyle Spitzer, a 42-year old season-ticket holder from Rhode Island who travels to FedEx Field with his two sons five or six times a season. He told his sons on Thursday morning that they were done, and he ripped up his invoice.

“We’re just fed up. We all thought McCloughan was the savior,” Spitzer said. “They can all go rot. They’re depriving me and my family and millions of fans of what every fan wants: just a normal, stable organization. They don’t have to win every year. But we can’t even have that.”

That’s why this is all apparently happening now, after two winning seasons, in the middle of the offseason. Because the team’s down payment on respectability had been the spoken promise that finally, finally, finally they would be normal. Before McCloughan, they had hired a hotshot college coach in Steve Spurrier, a newcomer in Jim Zorn, a Super Bowl winner in Mike Shanahan, and a revered icon in Joe Gibbs. They had acquired prominent quarterbacks via free agency, via trade and via the draft. They tried non-prominent quarterbacks, too. They had invested in big-money out-of-town stars, and they had gotten big-money out-of-town assistant coaches.

But they had never really tried this: a respected football scout with a winning pedigree who wanted to do things the “right” way: building through the draft, stocking up on homegrown talent, remaining independent from ownership, keeping the sideshows at bay. And now McCloughan appears to be on the way out, with hope and faith following on his heels.

It’s not as bad as I thought.

It’s worse. https://t.co/cAxEui83iL

— Burgundy Blog (@BurgundyBlog) March 9, 2017

“For the first time we were establishing credibility and a clear direction. Now what was once our savior is being driven out of town,” wrote George Carmi in a series of late-night texts. “I have no faith in the front office, I distrust the owner and all of my favorite players are leaving. What do I have left?”

“Scot was what we thought was our last sort of hope,” said Matthew Cafritz, 26, who said this month’s chaos convinced his dad to give up his season tickets after 15 years. “I’ve never experienced winning football, but the consistency with which this team steps on its own foot is just insane. At this point, I’m trying to make the decision not to suffer through it for no reason, because they’ve given nothing to people my age. … I can’t in good conscience continue to think this team is worth investing four hours in every Sunday, or an entire weekend when I go home for the games. I’m kind of using Scot as a blessing in disguise; if they’re going to send him out of town, then finally I can stop being mocked for being a Redskins fan.”

“It’s just absolutely devastating,” said Greg McKillop, a D.C. native who now lives in California. McCloughan “just seemed to bring so much confidence about finding good players, building from the ground, drafting well. All these things, in my lifetime, have been massive cavities, and he was a guy that was going to fill them. And to find all this out, it’s really tough to swallow. I can’t really in good conscience consider supporting the team because, to me, that’s just like supporting Dan Snyder. And I’d rather eat a wine glass.”

“I have been a fan of the Redskins for over 20 years and my family has had season tickets since I was 6,” wrote Nader Pishdad, in an email he also attempted to send to Allen. “Never have I been so upset and despondent over the team. This is the bottom. … Consider this the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Similarly minded fans posted emails on social media that they were writing to the team, which were too profane for me to include. They talked about this being their lowest moment, an almost unimaginable claim for fans of a franchise that has been through so much over the past two decades. They got #FireBruceAllen trending on Twitter in D.C. They still hoped for a way out, too, which is why so many of them wanted to demonstrate their anger in a public forum. Maybe, they thought, the team just doesn’t understand how much of their faith was resting in McCloughan.

@SonofWashington pic.twitter.com/IUHxXkVAvm

— Redskins Gold Pants (@SkinsGoldPants) March 9, 2017

“I’m just tired of seeing Skins fans complaining, saying I’m switching teams, saying I can’t take this anymore,” said Zieynaba Dem, who launched the petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power.”

“Most Skins fans saw Scot as hope,” she said. “And if he’s gone, we’re losing hope, because that means Snyder hasn’t changed at all.”

Online petitions are less successful than a last-second Hail Mary, but she figured she might as well try, and so this 22-year old from Indiana eventually motivated a 33-year old from Atlanta to sign the first petition of his life. Unlike some of the other furious fans, Biebighauser said he could never start supporting another team. Still, he had grown up going to games with his season ticket holding grandparents, and he still has vague memories of the last Super Bowl season. This latest reboot felt like “a huge opportunity, and they’re just completely shooting themselves in the foot,” he said.

“It’s anger today, just because some of the specific things coming out,” he said. “I’m sure tomorrow I’ll go back to the apathy I had for 15 years before. It didn’t have to be that way.”

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[flauntpage]

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

Over the next two months VICE Sports will be profiling 16 athletes as they evolve into national superstars. Keep checking back here to find them all.

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda's father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia's father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. "I mean, yeah it was hard," Mejia says of moving away from his family, "because I'm a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like."

Mejia spent a couple years training in South Florida, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. "On the court, he's a gladiator," Mateus said. "If he can chew you alive, he's going to do it."

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Eddie Herr, a prestigious youth competition. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon's main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy's overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it's fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy's physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri's original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy's amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it's now dotted with oversized maps telling you that "YOU ARE HERE."

All in all, tuition and expenses cost upwards of $70,000 per year (the Academy offers limited need-based financial aid; a spokesperson for the Academy declined to offer specifics such as how many students receive financial aid or how much the average aid package is). While IMG also runs a massive sports management agency that looms large over professional tennis, it seems that more than anything else, the Academy functions as a standalone enterprise to create a sporting oasis for whomever is willing to pay for it. In addition to the school, the Academy hosts professional athletes for off-season training programs, pro teams passing through, and some international youth tournaments.

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes' needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls "the last mile" or "the point of break." In other words, it's his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Mateus believes the traveling tennis lifestyle is its own form of education, albeit a very different one from a traditional high school. Young players experience a wide variety of cultures, and have to learn to be responsible in many different foreign countries. They learn a lot about their own bodies, the human anatomy, about nutrition and chemistry to ensure they adhere to the strict and confusing anti-doping guidelines of high-level tennis. Mateus also teaches his athletes to manage their finances, file expense reports, enact time-management techniques, and other practical lessons most kids are lucky to master by the time they graduate college, to say nothing of high school.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn't playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he'd play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

"Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls," Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families' lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, "the process."

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can't, or don't want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. "We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16," Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. "He had a period of two, three months," says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms "the real side," the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. "Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We're very happy about it. Happy for him," he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew's privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia's father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father's death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it's been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship "actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he's doing. He's filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live." For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father's death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he's doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they're still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia's family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he's made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was "one of the best moves I've made because here she has everything that she needs." In her eyes, the place is like "Disneyland for athletes."

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn't come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be "orange from head to toe" by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn't long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: "Mom, I'm going to play there, I'm going to win that, and I'm going to win it many times, and I'm going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike." She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia's best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter's tennis career?

"I decided it was a chance I had to take with her," Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn't bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: "Whenever I want this more than you do, that's the moment when I'm going to stop supporting you."

Edward Linsmier

This conundrum is not unique to Arango and her mother. For every teenage tennis player trying to make the jump from the youth circuit to the professional level, there is a family that must give up any semblance of a typical life. That athlete, in turn, must give up any semblance of being a normal kid.

A decade later, Arango's dream hasn't wavered, and some of it has even come true––she's sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, "sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom's like, 'Come on!' We're like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] 'You're seriously going to stay in bed?'" To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. "So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on."

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she's too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey's Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. "I'll text and Snapchat or whatever" when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. "I'm not, like, 'Hey, let's call and talk to each other,'" she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. "Like, my mom doesn't Snapchat and doesn't understand. 'Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?'," she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. "She'll text her sister and say, 'Hey I've got something to tell you,' and her sister answers 'OK' and then they'll call. But it's, like, why would you call me?"

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they've missed out on the critical stage in every person's life where they're given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They're tennis players.

"If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless," Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. "I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he's like a neighbor. He'll drop off my rackets so I don't actually have to pick them up."

"I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided," Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. "There's no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things." Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn't quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she's rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, "Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career."

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. "I don't know," she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn't, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that's why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. "She's passionate about it," her mother will tell me later. "I think she was born for this."

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes'

In the western Florida summer, you have two, three hours max after sunrise before the heat and humidity makes outdoor activity a dangerous proposition. 9 AM in mid-July is pushing it. In that sense, Nico Mejia is running late. On the courts of the IMG Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, Mejia takes his warm-ups with his doubles partner, Sebastian Korda. The pair try their best to rally with ease, keeping their competitive spirits at bay for as long as possible. But that never lasts long with tennis players, especially teenage boys. Soon enough, their shots increase in intensity and sweat soaks their backs.

Korda and Mejia both have tennis in their blood. Korda's father and coach, Petr Korda, won the 1998 Australian Open and 1996 Australian Open doubles with Stefan Edberg. Mejia's father, Gustavo, was an avid amateur player in Colombia, and his sister Gabriela was an All-American at the University of Miami and competed professionally. His uncle Juan Mateus—another Miami alum—is also his coach at IMG. In a sense, the question was never whether Nico Mejia would play tennis at some level but rather for how long. Still, he never felt any pressure to take up the family sport. Instead, his family stressed that whatever he chose to do in life, he needed to commit to it.

Edward Linsmier

So at the age of 12, he moved from his home in Cali, Colombia, to the tennis hotbed that is the Miami area to seriously pursue a career. "I mean, yeah it was hard," Mejia says of moving away from his family, "because I'm a person who likes to be with family. But since I moved when I was 12 years old, I kind of got used to not being with my family as much as I would like."

Mejia spent a couple years training at Club Med Tennis Academy, beginning in 2012, but he soon outgrew the competition. There were only a few other kids his age, and they treated tennis more as a hobby than a future. Mejia, from a young age, regarded the tennis court as an arena. "On the court, he's a gladiator," Mateus said. "If he can chew you alive, he's going to do it."

At the end of 2014, Mejia reached the Junior Orange Bowl, a prestigious youth competition hosted in Miami. He got knocked out in the Round of 32, but he had caught the attention of IMG Academy coaches, who recruited him for their tennis program. When Mejia toured the campus for the first time, he realized it was everything he had ever dreamed of. He enrolled the next year.

Edward Linsmier

For teenagers ready and able to commit completely to the rigorous lifestyle of a high-level junior athlete, there is perhaps no better place in the world than the IMG Academy. Founded in 1978 by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri, the then eponymously named Academy was the first major tennis boarding school and fundamentally changed how elite young players trained and prepared for professional tennis careers. In 1987, the year Bollettieri sold the Academy to IMG, 27 of his former and current students played in the U.S. Open, while 32 made it to Wimbledon's main draw. As of now, the tennis program has trained ten worldwide No. 1-ranked players, including Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, Monica Seles, and Jim Courier. In many ways, the Academy left a permanent mark on the tennis world.

Recently, the focus of the academy has shifted slightly, in line with the Academy's overall expansion, to accommodate teenagers seeking college scholarships in addition to aspiring pros. Over the past 15 years, the IMG Academy has spread its roots far beyond tennis to include football, baseball, golf, basketball, soccer, as well as track and field. Now it's fundamentally a boarding school where each of its 1,100 students is on a sports team. The Academy's physical footprint has grown accordingly, from Bollettieri's original 40 acres to a 450-acre campus lined with gleaming, glass-enclosed structures, modern dorms for the 70 percent of students who live on-campus, a nature reserve complete with a fishing pond, and countless pristine sport fields. The entire setup conjures a European soccer academy mixed with a Division I athletic program, and in fact, the Academy's amenities outclass those found at many D-I programs: fitness facilities and uniforms sponsored by Gatorade and Under Armour respectively, hydrotherapy for injury recovery, hyperbaric chambers for increasing lung capacity, nutrition coaches, leadership training, and vision and visual cognitive training. Golf carts, the preferred mode of transportation for IMG staff, constantly hum around the campus, which has grown so much that it's now dotted with oversized maps telling you that "YOU ARE HERE."

All in all, tuition and expenses cost upwards of $70,000 per year (the Academy offers limited need-based financial aid; a spokesperson for the Academy declined to offer specifics such as how many students receive financial aid or how much the average aid package is). While IMG also runs a massive sports management agency that looms large over professional tennis, it seems that more than anything else, the Academy functions as a standalone enterprise to create a sporting oasis for whomever is willing to pay for it. In addition to the school, the Academy hosts professional athletes for off-season training programs, pro teams passing through, and some international youth tournaments.

Of course, there are academic facilities on campus, too, tailored to fit the athletes' needs and future career goals. For elite high-school-age athletes, this offers a huge advantage over traditional schooling. In addition to aiding its students in qualifying for NCAA scholarships, the Academy equips students with the skills necessary to balance the unique social and academic pressures facing college athletes, while also teaching them to deal with issues that often trip up the pros. To that end, students receive media training in addition to a heavy core emphasis on the visual and creative arts.

Edward Linsmier

A few weeks shy of 40 years old and sporting a blue IMG Academy baseball cap, Mateus describes himself as a specific kind of coach. His job is to usher teenagers through what he alternately calls "the last mile" or "the point of break." In other words, it's his job to find out if they have what it takes to become professionals, both from a talent and maturity perspective.

Mateus believes the traveling tennis lifestyle is its own form of education, albeit a very different one from a traditional high school. Young players experience a wide variety of cultures, and have to learn to be responsible in many different foreign countries. They learn a lot about their own bodies, the human anatomy, about nutrition and chemistry to ensure they adhere to the strict and confusing anti-doping guidelines of high-level tennis. Mateus also teaches his athletes to manage their finances, file expense reports, enact time-management techniques, and other practical lessons most kids are lucky to master by the time they graduate college, to say nothing of high school.

Even with all of these resources, the transition to IMG can be a tough one. For the first six months, Mejia lived in the dorms on campus while his uncle still lived in Miami. Although it was the environment he always wanted—consistently facing high-level competition and access to professional-caliber training facilities—when he wasn't playing, practicing, or training, he was bored. To kill time, he'd play FIFA with his friends. But soon after he arrived at IMG, Mejia moved in with Mateus and he rediscovered the family life he had been missing.

Edward Linsmier

"Usually, 16 is very difficult for these boys and girls," Mateus says as Mejia jokes with Korda on the court. When kids upend their lives, and by extension, their families' lives, to accomplish such a lofty goal, they can get impatient. If a kid is used to winning every tournament without much difficulty and suddenly starts losing at the Academy, he or she might think something is wrong. They start making changes to their game, to their lifestyle, to themselves. They focus on the results on the court rather than, as Mateus puts it, "the process."

According to Mateus, only one to 1.5 percent of junior tennis players go straight to the pros. The rest go to college, which Mateus emphasizes is a good thing for most kids, who need a few years of stability. Maybe their bodies or minds need to fully mature. Perhaps they can't, or don't want to, cope with the nomadic life of a pro—or, understandably enough, they might not be ready to act like an adult all of the time.

But not Mejia. Mateus lauds his nephew for having a natural instinct on the court while maintaining a healthy attitude off it. "We were able to prolong the great times until he was almost 16," Mateus tells me. In the autumn of 2016, he adds, Mejia went through an attitudinal funk, an obstacle for developing tennis players that is something of an inevitability, according to Mateus. "He had a period of two, three months," says Mateus. Last December, his nephew crossed over to what Mateus terms "the real side," the point where a young player redoubles their dedication to focus on the sport. "Now, he sees what we see as an adult. We're very happy about it. Happy for him," he adds. As Mateus describes all of this in vague terms to respect his nephew's privacy, it almost sounds like like Mejia dealt with nothing more than a rough bout of almost becoming a teenager.

Edward Linsmier

Shortly after Mejia cleared this critical hurdle, however, tragedy struck. His parents had been working towards relocating from Colombia to Florida, where they could watch their son play, develop as a player, and emerge from IMG as both a professional and a fully formed adult. But, in April of this year, Mejia's father had a heart attack and died while playing tennis at his home in Colombia.

After his father's death, Mateus noticed a further change in Mejia. While it's been a tough time for both of them, he says, the hardship "actually fueled him to actually be a little bit more [focused on] what he's doing. He's filling a gap of whatever was left of his maturity. This helped him to realize that he has a lot more to live." For his part, Mejia discusses the impact of his father's death with a steely gaze. The last few months have been hard for him, he says, but he's doing his best to remember what his father taught him, to always be fighting, always be improving, always be competing, and, of course, to never give up. Sticking to platitudes while discussing a turbulent time in his life, Mejia already sounds like a seasoned professional.

Though the other top players at the Academy are expected to grow up quickly, they're still kids who need the companionship and support that only friends and family can offer. In this sense, Mejia's family is trying to adapt: in addition to having his uncle on campus, his mother is still planning to move up to Florida to join him. And he's made friends, too. That weekend, he had plans to go mini-golfing with Emiliana Arango, another Academy tennis player also from Colombia. I spoke to her mother, Juliana Restrepo, shortly before Mejia and Mateus as Arango practiced on an adjacent court. For Restrepo, who rents a house five minutes away from IMG, sending her daughter to IMG was "one of the best moves I've made because here she has everything that she needs." In her eyes, the place is like "Disneyland for athletes."

Unlike Mejia, Arango doesn't come from a tennis family. Instead, she grew up on a ranch in Medellin, where her family kept horses and cows. Her first love was horseback riding, but all that changed the first time she picked up a tennis racket, at five and a half years old. Arango loved playing on the clay courts. Restrepo recalls that her daughter would be "orange from head to toe" by the time they got home. At first, she played tennis once a week. Then twice a week. Soon, she was taking tennis lessons every day. By the time she was six, Arango was playing in organized competitions.

Edward Linsmier

As Restrepo tells it, it wasn't long after her first tournament that her daughter, while watching the French Open on television, made a prediction: "Mom, I'm going to play there, I'm going to win that, and I'm going to win it many times, and I'm going to be there, and I want to be sponsored by Nike." She stopped horseback riding and hanging out with friends as much. Instead of going to birthday parties, she preferred to play tennis.

By the time she was 12 years old, Arango was winning nearly every junior competition in Colombia that she entered. The family had already moved to Bogota to train at Colombia's best tennis academy, but it was clear Arango needed another step up. At that point, her mother faced a decision: Should she stop working as an architect for a multinational company, move to Florida with Arango to pursue her dream, and break up the family? Or should she keep the family and their lives intact, even if it meant ending any serious prospects for her daughter's tennis career?

"I decided it was a chance I had to take with her," Restrepo says as we watch Arango practice on the IMG courts. She viewed not moving to Florida as taking something away from her daughter, something she could never give back. She couldn't bring herself to do that. Not with the way Arango treated tennis. But, before they moved, she made a deal with her daughter: "Whenever I want this more than you do, that's the moment when I'm going to stop supporting you."

Edward Linsmier

This conundrum is not unique to Arango and her mother. For every teenage tennis player trying to make the jump from the youth circuit to the professional level, there is a family that must give up any semblance of a typical life. That athlete, in turn, must give up any semblance of being a normal kid.

A decade later, Arango's dream hasn't wavered, and some of it has even come true––she's sponsored by Nike these days. Now entering what would be her junior year, she spends her mornings at the Academy on the court and with the physical therapist doing recovery work before heading home to eat lunch. In the afternoon, she rests for a few hours, maybe takes a nap, before going to fitness training for two and a half hours. After dinner around 7 PM, she does schoolwork with her tutor—who she used before IMG and decided to stick with—via Skype until 9:30 or 10:30.

In tennis, even youth players spend a tremendous amount of time on the road. Arango travels for approximately half the year, with her mother accompanying her and handling all the arrangements. After practice, Arango tells me that when heading from tournament to tournament, "sometimes my mom makes me go sightseeing. You just want to, like, stay in bed a little bit more and mom's like, 'Come on!' We're like in, say, Barcelona, [and my mom says,] 'You're seriously going to stay in bed?'" To maximize her sleeping time, Arango has developed a very specific packing routine, organizing her clothes by outfit rather than by article of clothing. "So I just get there and just have to get it out and put it on."

To fend off boredom during the long flights or nights in the hotel when she's too exhausted to go explore, she likes to watch Grey's Anatomy on Netflix. While she often comes off as an old soul, Arango communicates from the road in the same ways that everyone else her age does. "I'll text and Snapchat or whatever" when she wants to keep up with friends, she says. "I'm not, like, 'Hey, let's call and talk to each other,'" she adds, citing generational differences between her and Restrepo. "Like, my mom doesn't Snapchat and doesn't understand. 'Why would you take selfies and send them to someone else?'," she says, good-naturedly mimicking her mother. "She'll text her sister and say, 'Hey I've got something to tell you,' and her sister answers 'OK' and then they'll call. But it's, like, why would you call me?"

Edward Linsmier

Before meeting Arango and Mejia, I suspected they––or their relatives––might feel as if by pursuing a tennis career, they've missed out on the critical stage in every person's life where they're given the freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and come away from it all with a sense of identity. Instead, the two teenagers showed me that perhaps that stage is only critical for the many of us who have no idea what we want to be when we grow up. Those years of rebelliousness and experimentation are useless to someone who already has it all figured out. For better or worse, their identity is already set. They're tennis players.

"If you ask her, she feels awkward seeing all the other kids doing stuff she thinks is meaningless," Restrepo tells me. When I bring this up to Arango, it becomes clear how ensconced in the athletic life she has become. One of the things she gets most excited about is not seeing Notre Dame in Paris or going to the Floridian beach with friends, most of whom she knows through IMG or the tennis world. Instead, her face brightens the most when discussing getting her rackets strung. "I mean, other than coming here and going to the gym, the only other place I go during the day is to…string my rackets. Which I love! I love the guy that works there because he's like a neighbor. He'll drop off my rackets so I don't actually have to pick them up."

"I tell her all the time: this is the world you decided," Restrepo says as we watch her daughter, wearing her signature backwards hat, hit groundstrokes on the court. "There's no time for tantrums or [other] teenager things." Arango expresses some mild frustration as her return volley isn't quite how she wanted it. Her coach, with whom she's rallying, waves it off, and they continue. Reflecting on the path her daughter has chosen, Restrepo says, "Sometimes, this is a lonely, very lonely career."

Earlier in day, I asked Arango to imagine her life without tennis. She had a quick answer to all my other questions, but not this one. "I don't know," she said, cracking a smile and looking up into the distance. She has apparently never thought about it. Of course she hasn't, I realized immediately afterward: I asked her to reimagine her life starting from age six. To answer, she would have to go back to Colombia, back on the horses. And that's why her mom took the tremendous step to bring her to Florida and to the Academy. "She's passionate about it," her mother will tell me later. "I think she was born for this."

With all of the emphasis on the final word, Arango finally answered: "I mean, I wouldn't know. I mean, what I would do."

What Life Is Like at 'Disneyland for Athletes' published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/10/washington-post-i-feel-betrayed-redskins-fans-erupt-in-fury-after-latest-reports-of-front-office-dysfunction-16/

Washington Post: ‘I feel betrayed': Redskins fans erupt in fury after latest reports of front office dysfunction

Two fans at the end of the last Redskins season. (Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

John Hunter Biebighauser follows politics, votes regularly, and keeps up with current events, but he had never signed a petition in his 33 years. That changed Wednesday night.

The cause that finally nudged him into put-your-name-on-the-line activism? Anger at Redskins President Bruce Allen, at the team’s chaotic front office and at the apparent ouster of beloved General Manager Scot McCloughan. Wait, really?

“It felt pretty stupid, to be honest … but I think they might actually read it, because they care so much about their image,” Biegbighauser said in a phone conversation late Wednesday night. And why now?

[A Redskins-McCloughan separation seems to be a question of when, not if]

“They’ve been an embarrassment for going on 20-plus years,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. But it’s actually having something that appears to be good go away.”

That’s the easiest way to explain why Redskins fans detonated Wednesday night. Their fragile faith in this team had been patched together not just by the barely winning records of the past two seasons, but by the idea that a competent football man was running the organization — free from petty interference and the drama of the past. The Post’s blockbuster exhumation of the past few months, published Wednesday night, seems to have blown away the last wisps of that faith. For many, raw fury was left behind.

An online petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power,” launched late Wednesday afternoon, had more than 1,900 signatures by Thursday morning. A Redditor urged fans to bombard the Redskins with phone calls of protest. Some fans began organizing a Friday morning “March on Ashburn.” A popular Redskins blogger posted purported contact information for Allen. By Thursday morning, the Junkies on 106.7 The Fan were brainstorming ideas to tap into this anger, including creating a Bruce Allen piñata and inviting fans to “come down here and beat the hell out of it,” as host Eric Bickel proposed.

“Fill it with lies,” John Auville suggested.

Another host said the station could host a mini-circus inside its studios. Fans, a producer noted, could “get their faces painted with disappointment.”

This all sounds like hyperbole, and maybe it is. But I spent Wednesday night talking to random Redskins fans on the phone. They were almost distraught.

“I feel betrayed,” said Michael Pettiford, a season ticket holder the past six years who said there’s now a 5 percent chance he renews. “I mean, it’s an embarrassment, and I just can’t financially support it anymore. … They made a good hire with Scot McCloughan. But if they’re not going to let him operate, there’s no point in thinking the team’s going to be good. And you just can’t support it.”

dont think ive ever seen the fan base this riled up

this might be rock bottom

— Eric Bickel (@EBJunkies) March 9, 2017

Look, I’ve spent way too much of my life writing about angry D.C. sports fans. Sometimes — remember the start to this Wizards season — the angst later seems overblown. The team rallies, mistakes are corrected (or turn out not to have been mistakes), and the anger dissipates. That’s certainly possible here. And I’ve obviously sought out frustrated voices, because they’re the loudest and most quotable. But there’s a level of bleakness here you don’t really expect to find among NFL fans in early March.

[If you’re sick of the Redskins’ chaos, maybe it’s time to start following the Wizards]

“There was something about being a season ticket holder that made me feel like I was being a really good fan,” wrote Chris Wooden in an email. “When I went through my divorce or was laid off from my job, it was a sanctuary for me. I love hanging with the people I sit near and tailgate with. I love the atmosphere, even when half the fans are from the other team.”

Now? He also said he’s 95 percent sure that he’s done, even if he might still buy tickets on the secondary market. And he’s trying to encourage other season ticket holders to post their displeasure — and their account numbers — on social media, to show the front office that they’re real and they’re serious.

“I do know that the team does listen and feels embarrassed,” he wrote. ” I feel this is the only way that as fans we can show Snyder that we are not an open bank [and] will not keep spending money on a dysfunctional product.”

Thursday morning, I got a call from Kyle Spitzer, a 42-year old season-ticket holder from Rhode Island who travels to FedEx Field with his two sons five or six times a season. He told his sons on Thursday morning that they were done, and he ripped up his invoice.

“We’re just fed up. We all thought McCloughan was the savior,” Spitzer said. “They can all go rot. They’re depriving me and my family and millions of fans of what every fan wants: just a normal, stable organization. They don’t have to win every year. But we can’t even have that.”

That’s why this is all apparently happening now, after two winning seasons, in the middle of the offseason. Because the team’s down payment on respectability had been the spoken promise that finally, finally, finally they would be normal. Before McCloughan, they had hired a hotshot college coach in Steve Spurrier, a newcomer in Jim Zorn, a Super Bowl winner in Mike Shanahan, and a revered icon in Joe Gibbs. They had acquired prominent quarterbacks via free agency, via trade and via the draft. They tried non-prominent quarterbacks, too. They had invested in big-money out-of-town stars, and they had gotten big-money out-of-town assistant coaches.

But they had never really tried this: a respected football scout with a winning pedigree who wanted to do things the “right” way: building through the draft, stocking up on homegrown talent, remaining independent from ownership, keeping the sideshows at bay. And now McCloughan appears to be on the way out, with hope and faith following on his heels.

It’s not as bad as I thought.

It’s worse. https://t.co/cAxEui83iL

— Burgundy Blog (@BurgundyBlog) March 9, 2017

“For the first time we were establishing credibility and a clear direction. Now what was once our savior is being driven out of town,” wrote George Carmi in a series of late-night texts. “I have no faith in the front office, I distrust the owner and all of my favorite players are leaving. What do I have left?”

“Scot was what we thought was our last sort of hope,” said Matthew Cafritz, 26, who said this month’s chaos convinced his dad to give up his season tickets after 15 years. “I’ve never experienced winning football, but the consistency with which this team steps on its own foot is just insane. At this point, I’m trying to make the decision not to suffer through it for no reason, because they’ve given nothing to people my age. … I can’t in good conscience continue to think this team is worth investing four hours in every Sunday, or an entire weekend when I go home for the games. I’m kind of using Scot as a blessing in disguise; if they’re going to send him out of town, then finally I can stop being mocked for being a Redskins fan.”

“It’s just absolutely devastating,” said Greg McKillop, a D.C. native who now lives in California. McCloughan “just seemed to bring so much confidence about finding good players, building from the ground, drafting well. All these things, in my lifetime, have been massive cavities, and he was a guy that was going to fill them. And to find all this out, it’s really tough to swallow. I can’t really in good conscience consider supporting the team because, to me, that’s just like supporting Dan Snyder. And I’d rather eat a wine glass.”

“I have been a fan of the Redskins for over 20 years and my family has had season tickets since I was 6,” wrote Nader Pishdad, in an email he also attempted to send to Allen. “Never have I been so upset and despondent over the team. This is the bottom. … Consider this the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Similarly minded fans posted emails on social media that they were writing to the team, which were too profane for me to include. They talked about this being their lowest moment, an almost unimaginable claim for fans of a franchise that has been through so much over the past two decades. They got #FireBruceAllen trending on Twitter in D.C. They still hoped for a way out, too, which is why so many of them wanted to demonstrate their anger in a public forum. Maybe, they thought, the team just doesn’t understand how much of their faith was resting in McCloughan.

@SonofWashington pic.twitter.com/IUHxXkVAvm

— Redskins Gold Pants (@SkinsGoldPants) March 9, 2017

“I’m just tired of seeing Skins fans complaining, saying I’m switching teams, saying I can’t take this anymore,” said Zieynaba Dem, who launched the petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power.”

“Most Skins fans saw Scot as hope,” she said. “And if he’s gone, we’re losing hope, because that means Snyder hasn’t changed at all.”

Online petitions are less successful than a last-second Hail Mary, but she figured she might as well try, and so this 22-year old from Indiana eventually motivated a 33-year old from Atlanta to sign the first petition of his life. Unlike some of the other furious fans, Biebighauser said he could never start supporting another team. Still, he had grown up going to games with his season ticket holding grandparents, and he still has vague memories of the last Super Bowl season. This latest reboot felt like “a huge opportunity, and they’re just completely shooting themselves in the foot,” he said.

“It’s anger today, just because some of the specific things coming out,” he said. “I’m sure tomorrow I’ll go back to the apathy I had for 15 years before. It didn’t have to be that way.”

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/03/10/washington-post-i-feel-betrayed-redskins-fans-erupt-in-fury-after-latest-reports-of-front-office-dysfunction-15/

Washington Post: ‘I feel betrayed': Redskins fans erupt in fury after latest reports of front office dysfunction

Two fans at the end of the last Redskins season. (Photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

John Hunter Biebighauser follows politics, votes regularly, and keeps up with current events, but he had never signed a petition in his 33 years. That changed Wednesday night.

The cause that finally nudged him into put-your-name-on-the-line activism? Anger at Redskins President Bruce Allen, at the team’s chaotic front office and at the apparent ouster of beloved General Manager Scot McCloughan. Wait, really?

“It felt pretty stupid, to be honest … but I think they might actually read it, because they care so much about their image,” Biegbighauser said in a phone conversation late Wednesday night. And why now?

[A Redskins-McCloughan separation seems to be a question of when, not if]

“They’ve been an embarrassment for going on 20-plus years,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. But it’s actually having something that appears to be good go away.”

That’s the easiest way to explain why Redskins fans detonated Wednesday night. Their fragile faith in this team had been patched together not just by the barely winning records of the past two seasons, but by the idea that a competent football man was running the organization — free from petty interference and the drama of the past. The Post’s blockbuster exhumation of the past few months, published Wednesday night, seems to have blown away the last wisps of that faith. For many, raw fury was left behind.

An online petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power,” launched late Wednesday afternoon, had more than 1,900 signatures by Thursday morning. A Redditor urged fans to bombard the Redskins with phone calls of protest. Some fans began organizing a Friday morning “March on Ashburn.” A popular Redskins blogger posted purported contact information for Allen. By Thursday morning, the Junkies on 106.7 The Fan were brainstorming ideas to tap into this anger, including creating a Bruce Allen piñata and inviting fans to “come down here and beat the hell out of it,” as host Eric Bickel proposed.

“Fill it with lies,” John Auville suggested.

Another host said the station could host a mini-circus inside its studios. Fans, a producer noted, could “get their faces painted with disappointment.”

This all sounds like hyperbole, and maybe it is. But I spent Wednesday night talking to random Redskins fans on the phone. They were almost distraught.

“I feel betrayed,” said Michael Pettiford, a season ticket holder the past six years who said there’s now a 5 percent chance he renews. “I mean, it’s an embarrassment, and I just can’t financially support it anymore. … They made a good hire with Scot McCloughan. But if they’re not going to let him operate, there’s no point in thinking the team’s going to be good. And you just can’t support it.”

dont think ive ever seen the fan base this riled up

this might be rock bottom

— Eric Bickel (@EBJunkies) March 9, 2017

Look, I’ve spent way too much of my life writing about angry D.C. sports fans. Sometimes — remember the start to this Wizards season — the angst later seems overblown. The team rallies, mistakes are corrected (or turn out not to have been mistakes), and the anger dissipates. That’s certainly possible here. And I’ve obviously sought out frustrated voices, because they’re the loudest and most quotable. But there’s a level of bleakness here you don’t really expect to find among NFL fans in early March.

[If you’re sick of the Redskins’ chaos, maybe it’s time to start following the Wizards]

“There was something about being a season ticket holder that made me feel like I was being a really good fan,” wrote Chris Wooden in an email. “When I went through my divorce or was laid off from my job, it was a sanctuary for me. I love hanging with the people I sit near and tailgate with. I love the atmosphere, even when half the fans are from the other team.”

Now? He also said he’s 95 percent sure that he’s done, even if he might still buy tickets on the secondary market. And he’s trying to encourage other season ticket holders to post their displeasure — and their account numbers — on social media, to show the front office that they’re real and they’re serious.

“I do know that the team does listen and feels embarrassed,” he wrote. ” I feel this is the only way that as fans we can show Snyder that we are not an open bank [and] will not keep spending money on a dysfunctional product.”

Thursday morning, I got a call from Kyle Spitzer, a 42-year old season-ticket holder from Rhode Island who travels to FedEx Field with his two sons five or six times a season. He told his sons on Thursday morning that they were done, and he ripped up his invoice.

“We’re just fed up. We all thought McCloughan was the savior,” Spitzer said. “They can all go rot. They’re depriving me and my family and millions of fans of what every fan wants: just a normal, stable organization. They don’t have to win every year. But we can’t even have that.”

That’s why this is all apparently happening now, after two winning seasons, in the middle of the offseason. Because the team’s down payment on respectability had been the spoken promise that finally, finally, finally they would be normal. Before McCloughan, they had hired a hotshot college coach in Steve Spurrier, a newcomer in Jim Zorn, a Super Bowl winner in Mike Shanahan, and a revered icon in Joe Gibbs. They had acquired prominent quarterbacks via free agency, via trade and via the draft. They tried non-prominent quarterbacks, too. They had invested in big-money out-of-town stars, and they had gotten big-money out-of-town assistant coaches.

But they had never really tried this: a respected football scout with a winning pedigree who wanted to do things the “right” way: building through the draft, stocking up on homegrown talent, remaining independent from ownership, keeping the sideshows at bay. And now McCloughan appears to be on the way out, with hope and faith following on his heels.

It’s not as bad as I thought.

It’s worse. https://t.co/cAxEui83iL

— Burgundy Blog (@BurgundyBlog) March 9, 2017

“For the first time we were establishing credibility and a clear direction. Now what was once our savior is being driven out of town,” wrote George Carmi in a series of late-night texts. “I have no faith in the front office, I distrust the owner and all of my favorite players are leaving. What do I have left?”

“Scot was what we thought was our last sort of hope,” said Matthew Cafritz, 26, who said this month’s chaos convinced his dad to give up his season tickets after 15 years. “I’ve never experienced winning football, but the consistency with which this team steps on its own foot is just insane. At this point, I’m trying to make the decision not to suffer through it for no reason, because they’ve given nothing to people my age. … I can’t in good conscience continue to think this team is worth investing four hours in every Sunday, or an entire weekend when I go home for the games. I’m kind of using Scot as a blessing in disguise; if they’re going to send him out of town, then finally I can stop being mocked for being a Redskins fan.”

“It’s just absolutely devastating,” said Greg McKillop, a D.C. native who now lives in California. McCloughan “just seemed to bring so much confidence about finding good players, building from the ground, drafting well. All these things, in my lifetime, have been massive cavities, and he was a guy that was going to fill them. And to find all this out, it’s really tough to swallow. I can’t really in good conscience consider supporting the team because, to me, that’s just like supporting Dan Snyder. And I’d rather eat a wine glass.”

“I have been a fan of the Redskins for over 20 years and my family has had season tickets since I was 6,” wrote Nader Pishdad, in an email he also attempted to send to Allen. “Never have I been so upset and despondent over the team. This is the bottom. … Consider this the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Similarly minded fans posted emails on social media that they were writing to the team, which were too profane for me to include. They talked about this being their lowest moment, an almost unimaginable claim for fans of a franchise that has been through so much over the past two decades. They got #FireBruceAllen trending on Twitter in D.C. They still hoped for a way out, too, which is why so many of them wanted to demonstrate their anger in a public forum. Maybe, they thought, the team just doesn’t understand how much of their faith was resting in McCloughan.

@SonofWashington pic.twitter.com/IUHxXkVAvm

— Redskins Gold Pants (@SkinsGoldPants) March 9, 2017

“I’m just tired of seeing Skins fans complaining, saying I’m switching teams, saying I can’t take this anymore,” said Zieynaba Dem, who launched the petition “to remove Bruce Allen from power.”

“Most Skins fans saw Scot as hope,” she said. “And if he’s gone, we’re losing hope, because that means Snyder hasn’t changed at all.”

Online petitions are less successful than a last-second Hail Mary, but she figured she might as well try, and so this 22-year old from Indiana eventually motivated a 33-year old from Atlanta to sign the first petition of his life. Unlike some of the other furious fans, Biebighauser said he could never start supporting another team. Still, he had grown up going to games with his season ticket holding grandparents, and he still has vague memories of the last Super Bowl season. This latest reboot felt like “a huge opportunity, and they’re just completely shooting themselves in the foot,” he said.

“It’s anger today, just because some of the specific things coming out,” he said. “I’m sure tomorrow I’ll go back to the apathy I had for 15 years before. It didn’t have to be that way.”

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link