Adding up ‘The Cost of These Dreams’ by Wright Thompson

by Andrew Hedglin

I have always lived in Jackson (or its suburbs), but for a couple of years in my mid-twenties, I lived and taught in an extremely rural area of the Louisiana delta. For a long time, I had trouble finding anybody my age to hang out with, and I reached desperately for things to connect me to the outside world that I had come from. I got really into podcasts for my long commutes (especially old episodes of This American Life). Every trip to Vicksburg seemed like a visit to a vast metropolis. And on Friday nights, I would head over to my town’s one small chain pizza joint, and I would read my copy of ESPN the Magazine.

Mostly, I’m a football fan, with only a minor concern for keeping a toe in other waters of the sporting well, mostly for conversation purposes. And occasionally, the content would run a little too deep into the numbers and statistics for me to connect. But often, astonishingly so, it was a repository of top-flight long-form journalism, stories that connect you straight to the truths of the human heart (Faulkner’s “old verities,” if you will). And Mississippi’s own Wright Thompson is a master of this form, evident in his new collection of his ESPN the Magazine stories, entitled The Cost of These Dreams.

I had let my magazine habit lapse some time after I got back to the Jackson area (although, to be fair, within a year, I was working at a bookstore). I guess I’m not the only one, because ESPN the Magazine will no longer distribute print issues after September. But every once in a while, it’s refreshing to go back and revisit the gorgeous prose put together for these magazines, no less worthy for being ephemeral, like an ice sculpture or a rose garden. I say that, but although some of these stories have a decade-old byline, they all feel remarkable fresh and relevant. If the form is temporary, the stories themselves have at least a little bit of timelessness to them.

Thompson tackles the travails of some of the biggest stars to ever play, like Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, Ted Williams, and Tiger Woods. But he is equally at home with ordinary citizens in New Orleans and Chicago. But people who have been to the pinnacle is obviously a fascination with him. This is the “dreams” part of his work.

But the theme that shows up again and again in this stories is devastation, either of the psyche, but sometimes of an entire physical place. This is the “cost” portion of Thompson’s work. What is so remarkable is how these ideas work hand-in-hand with each other, again and again in so many people and places.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, because I enjoyed them all immensely, but if my arm was twisted, I would have to say “Beyond the Breach,” a ten-year anniversary piece of New Orleans after Katrina that spans 70 pages of the book and once dominated an entire issue. My favorite part is when Thompson writes about Blair Boutte, a local business and community leader who grew up in the Iberville housing projects, who helped his friend Shack Brown run a community football league that helped local kids stay off the streets and, possibly, save their lives. The city’s parks department seizes the playground where the league is located to make a public green space that makes the city feel “safer” for people who make its hospitality economy run. And then Thompson writes the kicker: “For Blair, two contradictory ideas are true a the same time; there aren’t good guys and bad guys, but there are certainly winners and losers.”

It’s that sort of nuance, the mixing of the good and the bad, that we need to remember as live our lives and plan our cities, a reminder to be careful, to stop, to consider. We can reach for a better tomorrow, but what will it cost? If the cost is too high, is it really better, worthwhile?

So, yeah, every story in this collection is contractually obligated to connect to sports in some way. But sports are powerful symbols in society, and you don’t have to care about the fine-print box scores to feel the humanity and power in stories like these. If you feel the urge to connect to the larger world out there, you could do worse than reading The Cost of the These Dreams.

Wright Thompson will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “For the Love of the Game” sports panel at 10:45 a.m. at the Galloway Foundery.