The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout Read Free Book Online Page A

motive, or a witness to the crime and its planning, the state’s chances of winning a conviction on murder in the first will depend entirely on circumstantial evidence. There’s no shortage of that, of course, and much of it is compelling: the security tape seems to show Hernandez with the black .45 the night of the crime; the videotapes that track his car’s movements, from the time he picked up Lloyd at his house in Boston to the second they entered the industrial park before the shooting; the shell casing recovered from the rental car that matched the ones found beside Lloyd.
    To undercut the damning evidence, Hernandez may have to take the stand and provide an explanation, says Gerry Leone, the former district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, who convicted Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, among other high-profile cases. “You put him on if your defense case hinges on something that can only come from him”—for instance, the claim that he always carried a gun when leaving the house, protection from the gangsters who wanted him dead, and that it was Ortiz, not Hernandez, who pulled the trigger after a botched attempt to scare Lloyd. “If he says he was shocked by the shooting and only agreed to scare him, that might get him off,” says renowned Boston attorney Anthony Cardinale, who repped John Gotti and other mobsters and has taught at Harvard Law School. “It’s not a crime to be there if you had no reason to expect that someone would be shot.”
    A bigger problem for the prosecution is the all-or-nothing charge they’ve levied against Hernandez. In deciding to try him for murder in the first, they’ll be asking jurors to send a young man to prison for the rest of his life, no parole. “In these cases, juries think that reasonable doubt means no doubt at all,” says Cardinale. “If the defense can create even the slightest crack, he may walk like George Zimmerman walked—probably guilty, but the DA overcharged.”
    So call him stupid or sloppy or a menace to society, Hernandez keeps catching the breaks. He’s gotten rich running to daylight after being hemmed in, shedding tacklers and accusers to escape. If he eludes pursuit again, there will be blame to go around, but no one can claim they didn’t see it coming. He’s been getting away with murder, figuratively, if not literally, his whole life.

DAVID MERRILL
The One-Legged Wrestler Who Conquered His Sport, Then Left It Behind
    FROM DEADSPIN.COM
    Â 
    T HE FIRST MATCH of the last tournament of Anthony Robles’s wrestling career began with his dropping to the mat in a tripod—two hands and a knee. There was no other limb to use; Robles had been born without a right leg, and now the bottom of his maroon-and-gold Arizona State University singlet hung shriveled and slack on that side. His opponent in the 125-pound weight class, a Virginia sophomore named Matt Snyder, loomed over him, twice his height, even in a wrestler’s crouch.
    It was March 2011, and Robles was in Philadelphia for the NCAA Division I championships, college wrestling’s preeminent tournament. As a sophomore, he had finished an auspicious fourth; the next year, he had slipped to seventh. Now, as a senior, he was the top seed—a first for a one-legged wrestler. His remarkable achievement had drawn a throng of reporters to the pre-tournament press conference, where, to widespread bewilderment, Robles had announced that he would retire from wrestling at the end of the championships. He would not compete internationally. He would not try out for the London Olympics. He would become a motivational speaker, he had told the baffled reporters and fans before him, and turn his back on wrestling at the moment he had come to dominate it.
    Snyder circled. Robles pawed his opponent’s head, then shot forward, viperlike, at Snyder’s legs. There was no time to sprawl away. In an instant, Robles took