Sport

The run, in a 14-foot fishing boat pushed by a 25-horse motor, took the better part of two hours. Measured by the human experience of time, it was interminable. The main body of Black Lake feels oceanic, its iron seas plunging to fathomless depths, its illimitable reach stretching so far it seems to swallow the sky. There are no landmarks; there is nothing to reckon by. There is only the drone of the motor, the slap of the water on the hull, the boreal chill of the rushing air. Time passes, yes, but without any sense of distance being closed. It is as if you are crossing the void.

Then, at last, a bump appears on the horizon. Indistinct at first, unidentifiable, it slowly resolves into a fist of lichen-painted rock surmounted by jagged firs and spruces, their rough trunks thrusting at impossible angles toward the pale light of the sun. It is like watching the approach of a ghost ship, a derelict man of war, and for reasons that are as mysterious as those depths, it sends an icy shudder of apprehension down your spine.

But then another island looms, and another and another. Suddenly the world feels familiar again, space and time reconnected and made congruent. The vague fears ebb, the expectant, anticipatory thrill of the day’s fishing welling up to replace them. You’re almost there.

That morning it was overcast. A cool mist hung in the air, not falling so much as simply condensing, like breath on glass. My father, Harlan, was my fishing partner; our guide was a stolid and inscrutable Chipewyan named Moise, a man who, in the absence of a direct question, might go hours without uttering a word. We rounded a bouldery, reed-stippled point and saw, in the middle of one of the Cree’s lake-like widenings, another boat from Morberg’s. It was circling something in the water, something moving, swimming, alive.

A bear.

Coming closer, we could make out the broad dome of its skull, the tan, doglike muzzle, the erect, almost cartoonish ears. The occupants of the other boat, a pair of jowly retirees from Duluth named Bill and Clarence, were blithely snapping away with their Instamatics; their guide, a lean, self-satisfied Chipewyan who was Moise’s polar opposite — the Wolf, I’ll call him — stood in the stem with the outboard’s tiller in his hand, hazing the bear, keeping it in open water. It did not appear especially large, as bears go, but it was large enough.

As our boat came alongside, the two guides began to converse excitedly. Even the stoic Moise was unusually animated. I thought nothing of it, at first. But then something in their tone brought me up short, and I realized, with a kind of awful, epiphanic clarity, that this was not merely a photo opportunity for us “sports,” like easing up to a loon carrying its chicks on its back. The guides saw the bear as a windfall. The old imperatives — atavistic, tribal — were still in force.

I turned to Dad and said, “They’re going to kill it.”

He arrived in Lewiston as beat up as ever — breaks in his left leg and foot and right ankle — and he drew an old bull named Arctic Assassin.

He lowered into the chute for his first go-around.

Arctic Assassin spun and kicked out of the gate, and Mauney “sat down on my ass.” That mistake, as subtle as it was, knocked his timing out of sync. He started to fall, and then one last kick launched him into a backflip.

“I just round-assed off the thing,” Mauney says now, describing a predicament that makes more sense seen than heard.

He landed on the side of his head and rolled onto his knees. When he pushed down to stand up, he felt it: His neck had broken.

“Felt like somebody stuck a hot knife right in the back of my neck,” Mauney says. “I’d broke my back before, so I knew. I was like, ‘Son of a b—-, I just broke my neck.”

Mauney continues explaining the rest of it: the trip to the hospital, the surgery, the doctor’s orders — no more bull riding, at the risk of paralysis or death — and, finally, his decision a week later to retire from bull riding for good.

Then he walks across the front pasture at the XV Ranch, and calls out to an old black bull.

“C’mon, biggun!” Mauney shouts as he kicks over a bucket of feed.

After one more call, Arctic Assassin lumbers over.

May 2019. She is hard to miss. Her ankle-length dress is a flash of deep maroon against the chalky concrete sidewalk. Her French braid, thick and graying, sags as if trying to pull her down. She has to be miserable, running in the 90-degree heat of a southern Utah summer with a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists, in a dress with huge puffy shoulders.

She lumbers up the hill, grimacing as she reaches the top, and then turns and charges back down, the hem of her dress swishing over dirty white Reeboks. At the bottom, she turns around and does it again.

Hill repeats. In a prairie dress.

The old-fashioned uniform is unmistakable. She is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the FLDS. But running? My previous encounters with fundamentalist Mormons in the area had given me the impression that exercise, much less running alone, isn’t something women are supposed to do.

I wanted to know what spending their life in the woods hunting for worms meant, but I also wanted to know where this mysterious, artful tradition came from. In the UK, there are a handful of worm-charming competitions and festivals in Devon, Cornwall, and Willaston that began in the 1980s and another in Canada that started in 2012. I’d heard of similar events in east Texas, of people using pitchforks and spades as well as burying one stick in the ground and rubbing it with another to coax worms up to the surface. Later, I even found a newspaper clipping from 1970 reporting on the first International Worm Fiddling Championship, in Florida. I searched for a deep well of literature on the practice but found nothing. Certainly, worm grunting predated the Revells. But why did rubbing a stick stuck in the ground with a metal file conjure earthworms? The only way to understand was to follow the Revells into the woods.

Tomorrow, New York’s Long Island suburbs will host a game expected to be viewed by twice as many people as the Super Bowl. Most Americans, however, don’t know the rules of the sport being played and would find it impossible to follow—unless they were watching with a very patient friend from England, or India, or Australia.

I am talking, of course, about cricket, and this Sunday’s clash between the fierce sporting—not to mention geopolitical—rivals, India and Pakistan. Ticket prices are approaching Taylor Swift levels, and when the first ball (that’s pitch in baseball speak) is bowled (thrown) at 10:30 a.m., half a billion people around the world are expected to tune in to watch it. […]

It was not always so. What most Americans don’t realize is cricket has real roots here. Benjamin Franklin himself brought a copy of the rules over to the colonies in 1754. Washington’s troops played pickup games of “wicket” at Valley Forge. Abraham Lincoln was a cricket fan. Central Park’s North Meadow was once a cricket pitch. And the first ever international cricket match was played between America and Canada right here in New York in 1844. The greatest sport known to man was once as American as apple pie!

Things went wrong around the time of the Civil War. According to one theory, young American men were too busy killing each other to futz around with the complicated preparations that cricket requires. Also, a traditional game can last up to five days. A pickup game of baseball was easier to squeeze in between battles. Enterprising baseball promoters took it from there, but it helped that in 1909, cricket was organized under a body called the Imperial Cricket Council, which allowed only countries that were part of the British Empire to participate. Give me liberty or give me cricket, in other words. The Americans chose liberty.

But these days, Americans can have both.

Dommaraju Gukesh, born May 29 2006, has sensationally won the Candidates Tournament to decide the challenger for the world chess title, the match for which will be staged later this year. When Garry Kasparov, at the age of 22, won the championship in 1985, it was believed impossible for any younger player to supplant his record. Now, the prospect has arisen that a teenager may seize the world crown at the age of 18, the more so given the ongoing doubtful form of the incumbent, the Chinese World Champion Ding Liren.