There is no lateral movement in the Sanders household anymore. Just Barry, alone, in a plain brown bungalow with straight walkways and 90-degree turns, fifteen miles from Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Just Barry, alone, drinking Crystal Light and watching OK State games on basic cable. Just Barry, alone, waking early to bait his rod, waiting for sunrise on the creek.

Just Barry, alone, in his twilight years.

“I live a simple life,” Barry says. “I write poetry when it rains.”

It took years for journalists from the nation’s major news outlets to give up their quest for the Definitive Barry Sanders Interview, the Barry Sanders Feature Story, the Barry Sanders: Behind the Scenes special, but over time the calls and emails waned. Eventually Lions fans stopped making their pilgrimage to Stillwater—gone, finally, were the turkey legs they chucked at Barry’s window, the shreds of Honolulu blue and silver they molted on his front lawn.

“I used to think it was impossible to disappear,” Barry says. “I ordered copies of all the big newspapers and cut my name out of all the columns. Every few months I burned the scraps in a hollow gourd—some voodoo magic Kevin Glover taught me.”

Barry pauses to pop a Werther’s Original in his mouth.

From across the table, Jon Chalk nudges his tape recorder closer to the former Lions star. Barry talks in a low drone, just louder than a whisper, and Jon worries some words will turn out fuzzy on the tape. With the biggest story of his career on the line, he isn’t willing to take any chances.

“But Jon, one day I realized something,” Barry says. “I realized the guy they’ve got on those videotapes, the photographs, all those stories—that’s Barry the Ball Player. That’s not Barry the Man. Barry the Man—they never even knew him.” Barry clicks the Worther’s against his teeth. “And after I realized that, Jon? Well, escaping got a whole lot easier.”

“What about the fans?” Jon asks. “They loved you.”

“They might have loved Barry the Ball Player, but they never loved Barry the Man,” Barry says. “Nobody ever loved Barry the Man.”

In the mid-1990s, Metro Detroit football fields were infirmaries for strained hip flexors, sprained ankles and broken legs. Cities were strewn with casualties of clumsy imitation, teenagers attempting to mirror Barry’s cutbacks, his hip-swivel-and-turn, his dart around the offensive line into a gap, back out of a gap, jab in one direction, shift to the other and reverse through the backfield into daylight so clean that not even the camera man could catch him.

Jon Chalk had been baptized in the lurching, shifting explosion of a Barry Sanders touchdown run, the wobbling fart of a Scott Mitchell interception. When Barry faxed in the news of his abrupt retirement, Jon Chalk was nine years old. He swore to his mother he’d never love again.

Forty years later, he still hasn’t let it go. The rest of the sports world was too easily satisfied with Barry’s attempts at closure—a Heisman commercial, a video game cover, a gutless autobiography—but for Jon Chalk, it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough.

After a lifetime of being ignored and denied, Jon never asks Barry why he finally agreed to the interview. But after walking into his Stillwater home, Jon begins to understand.

The only pieces of furniture in Barry’s living room are a 12-inch TV set on a plastic crate and a brown Lay-Z-Boy chair dimpled with the mold of Barry’s bloated hips. The walls are an unblemished beige. In the kitchen, the counters have been scrubbed so hard the laminate is beginning to peel.

“I just figured it’s time,” Barry says. “I just figured you might have some questions to ask me.”

“How much do you still think about football?” Jon asks. “Does it keep you up at night?”

“It was a job,” Barry says. He stares at Jon blankly. Though his cheeks hang lower in old age, his face is still the same as the one that stared back at Jon from the wall opposite his bed in his childhood bedroom—the same face that Jon and his father finally tore down together.

“Do you miss anything about it?”

“The camaraderie, I guess.”

“With your teammates?”

“No, I mean with the refs,” Barry says. “Used to treat the whole crew to lunch every Saturday. Chili’s or Applebee’s. I’ve got a lot of respect for those guys.”

“Why didn’t you just embrace the fame?” Jon asks.

“I told myself I’d never be what anyone wanted me to,” Barry says.

There is a long-buried memory forcing its way up that Jon can’t keep down: him, age, seven, riding in his dad’s truck to the Silverdome where Lions players were signing autographs. He and his father standing in line for hours, inching closer to Barry—his hero, the man with his hips on a swivel. Him clutching the plastic Lions helmet in his hand for an hour, two hours, three. He and his father watching Barry stand up and, despite the pleas of the crowd, slink away across the field, into the recesses of the stadium. Jon’s father, brushing a tear from his boy’s cheek. Jon bravely telling his father it was OK, really, it was only Robert Porcher’s autograph he wanted anyway.

Jon’s nails dig crescents into the imitation wood of Barry’s table. He came here as a journalist, but he can’t help that he is burdened with the same curse that has doomed Lions fans since the days of Bobby Lane: inside him are two wells, one of hope and one of anger, and the two of them are dug so close that he’s never sure which will erupt from within him.

“Gutless,” he says. “You’re gutless. You gutted your team and your fans and then you did the only thing you were ever any good at—you ran away.”

Jon has had enough of Barry’s blank expressions, his non-answers, the smell of Lysol in the air.

“You gutless motherfucker,” he says, the anger up to his eyes. “Don’t you feel guilty for what you did? Don’t you regret it? The lawsuit? The kids and their fathers—goddammit, Barry, do you even feel shame?”

Sweating and panting, Jon knows he’s gone too far. Never in his thirty years as a reporter has he raised his voice in an interview, not even in response to a player’s goading or a coach’s taunts. He runs his hands through his thinning hair. He is thinking of how he will defend himself to his editor, what he will do for work when he is fired, when an unexpected sound breaks the silence in Barry’s Stillwater home.

Barry begins to cry.

“Son,” he says, “you have no idea. My own teammates were afraid of me. They were jealous, they were angry. Have you been in a Lions locker room lately? It was toxic in the nineties, boy. For ten years I ate alone—Jason Hanson and I both ate alone. I couldn’t even look him in the eye; I knew I would lose it if I did.”

The tape on the recorder zips to a stop on the table, but Jon doesn’t dare move.

“You ask me if I know what I’ve taken from Detroit, but has anyone ever asked what Detroit took from me? What Rodney Peete and Erik Kramer and Scott Mitchell took from me? I used to love the game. I used to think I was capable of love. Son, you don’t know how easy it was for me to change direction. I was born to do this shit. And now look at me—look at how it all went to waste. By ’95 Wayne Fontes was feeding me a half flask of vodka before every game. It was the only way I could face them, all of the fans who thought I was their savior. The fans who thought I was an answer and forgot I was a man. And now you ask me if I regret the life I’ve lived? If I miss going back to that field, those people, who took from me everything I ever loved? Son, you don’t even know what you’re saying. You don’t even know who I am. All I ever wanted to do was run.”

Barry brushes his sleeve across his cheek. Jon reaches into his pocket and hands him a tissue. The two men stare at each other, each bleary eyed and desperate for the other. Finally Barry speaks again, soft and slow.

“Son, let me ask you a question. After all these years, what can I do for Detroit? What is it that you want from me now?”

The voice that answers him isn’t Jon Chalk the Lions beat writer but Jon Chalk the child, the one who refused to eat for three days after the Lions’ 1997 playoff loss to Tampa Bay. The one who held his plastic Lions helmet over the trash a dozen times but could never drop it in.

“An autograph,” he says.

Barry meets Jon’s eyes and nods. He hangs his head in his wrinkled hands.

Jon reaches into his bag and pulls out his old number twenty jersey, the companion to the plastic helmet he finally lost in a move long ago. He lets his fingers move over the mesh, the tape of the name on the back. After all these years of asking questions, finally a chance to get the only answer he’s ever wanted to hear.

But when he lays the jersey out on the table, Barry is already gone. He’s slipped out the back way, made his escape into the shadows like he’s always done. Like he’s always wanted to do.

 

Justin Brouckaert's work has appeared in The Rumpus, The McNeese Review, Banango Street, Sundog Lit, Metazen, and Squalorly, among other publications. Born and raised in Metro Detroit, he is now a James Dickey Fellow in Fiction at the University of South Carolina.