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gold Honda CR-V pulls up to the corner of Waveney Street and Cadieux Road just after dinner on a lush autumn night. There are 24 wooden discs in the cargo hold. Each one weighs 5 1/3 pounds -- hard sugar maple shaped back in the early 1970s to resemble wheels of Edam cheese. The discs have been meticulously sanded and refinished over the summer with half a dozen layers of polyurethane oil.

The driver, Erik Greer, is one of those kooks who believe in Detroit. Not the chrome-plated motor city that once was, nor the make-believe version the Super Bowl ads say is roaring back. Greer, 56 and moving like an aging shortstop, is the sort of guy who, when the night feels just right, will shout, "Down goes Frazier!" He believes in Detroit. Right now. As is. And if that doesn't make him enough of an anomaly in this world, he also believes in American featherbowling.

Featherbowling was born from that medieval family of games that endure in no small part because they can be played with a beverage in the shooter's free hand. It's Belgian shuffleboard. It's horseshoes with a pigeon feather target. It's bocce, except you roll discs that have been slightly weighted to rotate unevenly across the earth, exposing the shooter's secret divine grace. It's pétanque, kubb, mölkky, curling, Cherokee marbles, Irish road bowls -- the variations are endless -- but none has the otherworldly mystery of this thing they play at the Cadieux Cafe on the east side of Detroit. That 60-foot downhill triple breaker Tiger Woods nailed on the 17th hole at TPC Sawgrass in 2001, which sucked every last atom of karma out of the air around it -- that's every sixth shot in featherbowling. You shout op de pluim when your ball snakes through the gantlet of other fallen wheels, wobbling like a wounded buffalo nickel, before settling on the feather.

Which is to say, it's a game in which tiny prayers are repeatedly answered, accumulating over time, until something is answered that nobody had even known to pray for. Thus a line forms outside the bar around Greer's CR-V, while inside a 20-piece oompah band shifts into "The Star-Spangled Banner" and then the Belgian national anthem -- "La Brabançonne" (which also happens to be 0519 on the jukebox) -- and 50, maybe 60 men pass the wooden wheels from one set of hands to the next, like buckets of water to a fire, past the Manneken Pis figurine and Eddy Merckx memorabilia, steadily around tables piled high with Prince Edward Island mussel shells, the gathered crowd clapping and stomping as the trumpets come to life. Each wooden ball goes all the way to the back, where half-filled chalices of something that translates as "Devil" sit on the counter, then through what appears to be an exit door and across a battered threshold.

Behind this exit door, long fluorescent bulbs illuminate two 72-foot dirt trenches. Nobody knows exactly how the trenches came to be. Men from the Old World would come in at all hours, tending them like the infield at the old Tiger Stadium. Building and pouring, hip deep in overlapping generations of misplaced earth. There's no floor beneath the trenches. "For all we know, they could go all the way down to China," says Ron Devos, a guy who grew up sleeping on a cot in the back of the bar. His dad was a painter and a pigeon fancier who acquired the onetime speakeasy in 1962, and Ron has spent the past half century trying to divine the provenance of the playing surface -- sand, clay, salt water, cat litter, ox blood -- God knows what else those old Belgians thought to mix in over time. In the afternoon before opening night, he feeds each trench half a bucket of sawdust, pausing to make sure the pigeon feathers are flush at each end.

There is a map of Belgium painted on the wall. A sparse list of the rules ("no high heeled shoes," "no lofting of balls"). The Packers are playing on a small TV, which nobody looks at twice. There are a couple of tattooed bikers in the corner. There are dudes in snazzy newsboy caps and dudes in Tigers hats, rims painstakingly worked in. There are white dudes, black dudes, hippies, veterans, ditch diggers, architects, lawyers, criminals, doctors and alcoholics. There are kilts, shorts, frayed jeans, office slacks. Some dudes are thumping their chests as some silently absorb every bit of the moment. And because it's opening night of the 2014 season, there are ladies there too. A voice, with the zeal of the guy from "Thunderdome," bellows, "Ladies and gentlemen, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN ..."

Greer, the president, is introduced. He directs the crowd's gaze up to the wall above the first trench, where portraits of grand champions hang. A yellow rag from the kitchen covers the painting at the far right end, just beneath the pressed tin ceiling. At Greer's signal, the rag is pulled, revealing a Dickensian character -- half wolf, half Abraham Lincoln -- pork chop sideburns and blinding black stovepipe hat leaping out from gnarly Van Gogh swirls. It's a portrait of the one they call Gosskie. Lips quiver. Tears well. A herald trumpet blasts the call to post. Names are pulled from three compartments of a small wooden box. Teams and matchups are set. And the men who come every Thursday to the Cadieux get down to work.

THROUGH THE YEARS, the old Belgians would study the dirt like paintings on a cave wall. Each trench is its own living thing. The bowlers would patiently walk the intended parabola of the balls they roll so their teammates would understand what they saw, shuffling up and down the dirt like telemark skiers. You can't travel the path until you become the path. Depending whom you ask, a perfectly executed shot represents basic calculus, or else some visceral kind of pilgrimage across a Ouija board. Marc Tirikian, the most dangerous featherbowler in America entering the season, is an architect who sees sine waves. Add more velocity for a tighter arc, less for more.

Featherbowling 101 Illustration by Martin Laksman 1. In featherbowling, the team that rolls its oblong balls closest to the target earns points. If Team A has the three closest attempts, for example, it racks up a point for each. 2. Most games have three players to a side, and teams get six total tosses each per round. But just like in basketball, pickup games depend on circumstance. 3. In a departure from similar competitions, the team that's leading off throws all its balls first. That leaves time for Team B to perhaps plot an attempt at knocking its opponents away from the target. 4. The wooden ball is made of six layers of laminated maple and has a depression on one side. It is 5 inches wide, weighs 5 1/3 pounds and is 7.8 inches in diameter, making for an object that rolls precariously on its side. 5. Featherbowling lanes are 72 feet long and 9 feet wide. They're more highway-pothole rough than bowling-alley slick. Players' targets are 60 feet away from each other on opposite ends, leaving a 6-foot buffer at each end before you're out of bounds. 6. The game's nominal feathers, shipped from a Belgian pigeon-racing club, serve as visual identifiers. The actual target is a bronze stake driven into the ground that sits just behind. The first team to 10 points wins it all.

Greer's vision is rather more complicated. Like Tirikian, he develops equations for specific apogees. But he does a metaphysical calculation too. He works nights at an Air National Guard base outside the city and likes to come a couple of days before opening night, before Devos adds the sawdust. He'll pour a stream of beer along the dirt, looking up to the portraits, asking for help in seeing the lines. He's had CAD sketches made to understand the complexity of the three separate radiuses inside each wooden ball. To understand the curvature of the trenches, he once took their measurements to a math professor at Wayne State.

Three weeks before opening night, an upper-level storm raced north across Michigan, where it ran into an unusual amount of moisture that had gathered in the air, and the second biggest rainfall in Detroit's history was recorded. The trenches absorb every calamity from the neighborhood outside, including the high water. Early in the night, bowlers would pick up on a small lesion 4 feet from the feather, about even with the cigarette machine, meaning a shot that appears ready to stop will suddenly dip down behind the feather, all the way to the back gutter like in a rigged carnival game. A couple of first-class bowlers find another dip 4 feet ahead of the first one. The first games of the night are havoc, everyone trying to factor in these new polyps growing from the path. "The perfection of our game is in the imperfection of the lanes," Greer likes to say.

For decades it was thought that only the old Belgians could read these imperfections. And not just any old Belgians. Those from a small region in West Flanders. It was as if those Flemish men had been born, like swamp monsters, from the trenches on Cadieux Road. A grand champion needed this blood, it was thought, and for generations there seemed to be an invisible asterisk beside anyone who won the title but wasn't from that direct line.

In 1976, Michael Chateau arrived at the Cadieux for a reception that followed the funeral of his friend Jerry Lemenu's mother. Chateau had never encountered such a world. He found himself returning to it, again and again. Many of the old Belgians had been active in the Resistance during WWII. One night, he listened as one of them read aloud from the Gazette van Detroit, a small ad taken out by a pilot from from Mishawaka, Indiana who had been shot down over a village. He was hoping to find the teenager who had tracked the fallen plane and helped him to safety years before. "That was me," Henry Verlinden, one of the bowlers, said nonchalantly. Sure as hell, the pilot showed up at the Cadieux a few weeks later and bought Verlinden a beer. "It was almost like this sacred thing to join," said Chateau, who came on Thursdays -- league night -- for six straight years before he gathered the nerve to ask whether he could play.

Tirikian grew up in the neighborhood. He left for college, then to play professional soccer in France. Then, when everyone he grew up with was fleeing Detroit, he moved back and dedicated himself to featherbowling. He won his first grand championship in 1998. His dad was killed less than a year later, just outside the Cadieux. Every Thursday he has to walk by where it happened. Nobody questions the blood Tirikian has in this place.

Up 6-2 against Greer on opening night, Tirikian would have a shot to end the game. From 60 feet away, Greer begins humming what sounds, at first, like some jangled kind of techno. As the humming becomes more emphatic, it sounds more like something from Dr. John's "Right Place Wrong Time." Greer is effectively trying to place a voodoo hex on Tirikian's last ball, something he conjures no more than three times in a season. As the humming hits a fever pitch, Tirikian's promising up-and-down seems to suddenly get sucked into the pile and away from the feather. Greer flings his arms up in triumph and shakes his head in disbelief. "It never fails."

AT THE BEGINNING of the 2012-13 season, Greer had begun to see the underlying system that connected it all. He had gotten off to a perfect start that season. Five games. Five wins. Fifty points. And then the most inexplicable thing to ever happen to American featherbowling happened: Steve Gosskie.

Around the neighborhood, they called him Farmhouse Steve because he lived in one of the 19th-century creakers just down the street from the Cadieux. He lived with Weezie, a beagle who was part Rottweiler and part lots of other things; he found her chasing butterflies near the abandoned Eloise Asylum. Gosskie was a magnet for all the city's Weezies.

He existed in that distinctly Detroit nebula of artists and machinists and miscellaneous rounders who'd make music and work relentlessly restoring broken-down mansions, only to stay up all night arguing Tesla versus Edison, tinkering with old engines. He'd drink after work with friends, covered in soot and asbestos and lead from crawling up into secret crevices, yanking on the tentacles of the rotting city. He liked to joke how the asbestos was cotton candy, the lead chocolate. You get a little delirious hauling a hundred pounds of cotton candy from those empty houses on a cold afternoon.

Gosskie had been hanging around the Cadieux as long as anyone could remember, and he felt a little bit like the league's mascot. He was 5-foot-7 and forever trying to cajole his shots with gestures after they'd been thrown. As an intense game would take shape, he'd inch lower to the ground, sometimes getting all the way down on his stomach. He stepped into his shots, his fingers digging into the trench just before the release so he'd have to spend the next day scrubbing dirt out of his nails. He was what they call a third-class bowler. Nobody took his game too seriously. Nobody knew how badly he wanted to be great.

But, like Greer, five weeks into that 2012-13 season, Gosskie was also undefeated. He stopped shaving. He didn't cut his hair. He'd have primers in the farmhouse with Weezie before he bowled. Blast Max Roach records. He'd build this rhythm that was at once organic and mechanical.

I love the ricochet, and I’d get that click, bounce and snap, and then you’re on the feather. - Steve Gosskie

Games go to 10. You want to win each game every week, but it's total points that count through the season. Lose 10-9, you're going to have to buy the beer after. Get skunked 10-0 a couple of weeks early on, and you can kiss the grand championship goodbye. The accomplished featherbowler is playing a contest that spans not just the season but years and even decades. Third-class bowlers such as Gosskie tend to have less experience and a lower set of expectations. And so, nine weeks into that magical season, when Gosskie still hadn't lost, a couple of the older bowlers realized something was happening.

It was something like witnessing Mark Fidrych pitch at Tiger Stadium in 1976. Gosskie would hurl wheels recklessly, leaping to his feet, contorting his limbs and body like a maestro, directing the shot through impossible passages and chicanes. It was as if his entire life force had entered the wooden ball. "A lot of guys saw it as accidental," he said later, shrugging his shoulders. "They'd say I'm coming in too fast. I love the ricochet, and I'd get that click, bounce and snap, and then you're on the feather." He began calling his shots -- just so people would believe they were intentional. "Sometimes, man, you get this lumber pile, and you throw the bejesus out of it -- it's got a kinetic punch." He'd point at the spot where two balls came awkwardly together and a third was up on its side. He'd draw in a long breath, like he was going to try a shot, but instead start humming the theme from "The Dukes of Hazzard."

Gosskie harked back to some more remote age. He was born in 1967, basically the moment Detroit's decline began. "By the time I was able to rub my eyes and look around, it was already kind of rough," he said. As a kid, he delivered the Free Press in the morning, The Detroit News after school. He'd save his last parcel for the Cadieux. There was so much cigar smoke you could barely see across to the other side. Some afternoons, one of the Belgians would let Gosskie and the other newsboys go back to the trenches. Alone, nobody watching. "We would just set stuff up."

He learned to bowl on the house balls, which had been up and down the lanes for 60 straight years, each amassing thousands of miles, slamming against the piles, gaining its own pocked shape. When he finally joined the league in 2009, it took time to adjust to the magical balls the regulars waxed and worshipped.

By March 2013, he was up 12 points with five weeks to go. He simply couldn't be beaten. Meanwhile, Greer's season had gone off the rails. But that didn't seem to matter. Gosskie was proof of the divinity in what Greer had taken to calling "our game." See the line? Gosskie goddamn was the line.

Maybe, above all, he understood better than any of them the earth from which the trenches were constructed. As a newsboy, he'd been on and under every porch in the neighborhood. He had apprenticed at hardware stores, picking up business after work, crawling into basements and attics, down holes, and through the miscellaneous rust and mildew that built up. Some nights he would go to this spot on Jefferson Avenue and dig for whatever old pieces of Detroit he could find. Beer bottles, rusted stoves. He filled the farmhouse with artifacts. He wanted to feel his fingerprints against the fingerprints of anonymous east siders from back when. The portraits of past champions above the trenches in the Cadieux consumed him. In the final weeks of the season, Gosskie began to imagine his own face on the wall. He tightened up. In the final month, his overall lead slipped to five points. Previous champions tried to keep him focused. "You don't fire at the enemy," first-class featherbowler Major Ken Withrow said, reminding him of the best path for a shot. "You fire ahead of the enemy." And that night, with the Major as his teammate, Steve Gosskie became the grand champion.

JEAN GENET ONCE SAID, "a painting by Rembrandt not only stops the time that made the subject flow into the future but makes it flow back to the remotest ages." Such is the abiding quality of the featherbowling portraits. They begin in 1987 but look for all the world as if they've hung above the trenches since the 17th century. The loose brushwork in those first portraits -- the direct stare out to the viewer, glimmer of light in the eyes of the sitter -- is directly influenced by the early Dutch masters. By the time the artist undertakes Gosskie, the pastel color palette is more evocative of Van Gogh.

Some who have seen the portraits have suggested that the open and expressive lines denote a curious sense of urgency. As if the artist is trying to capture a likeness in a short time.

The artist, Jerry Lemenu, discovered the Cadieux 37 years earlier, mourning his mother's death. He felt then as if he'd entered some surreal dream that connected the Old World to the New. If you've ever read a major daily newspaper or watched network news, you've seen Lemenu's work. He drew Pete Rose on trial. Manuel Noriega. John DeLorean. Medgar Evers' unrepentant killer, Byron De La Beckwith. Hence the urgency of the lines. In 1981, a producer for Channel 4 in Detroit was so taken with what Lemenu could see in the courtroom that he assigned him to draw the Thomas Hearns-Sugar Ray Leonard fight at Caesars Palace. Before it happened. The station gave him a box of videotapes and a computer prediction and instructions to draw every round. And for 14 rounds, one of the greatest welterweight fights in history went exactly as Lemenu had drawn it. Hearns took the early rounds, Leonard rallied in the middle. In Lemenu's sketches, Hearns comes on strong at the end but it's not enough. "I would have been right on the money except for Hearns getting knocked out in the 14th," he says.

Lemenu has won the grand championship twice -- once on the last night of the season. He also once lost it on the final night. "Everybody is a great winner," he says. "But when you can lose graciously and tip your cap like Valere Spetebroot, who would take his handkerchief out, put it down, get down on one knee and kiss the hand of the person who beat him. When you can do that kind of thing, then you get it."

Lemenu was so moved to capture Spetebroot's era, before it disappeared, he began making sketches. He read the faces of these old Belgians like the geology of the Cadieux's trenches. He did one for each new champion. At the same time, he dug back into the roots of the game, creating portraits of those who had won before he arrived at the Cadieux. Sometimes he'd have to work off photographs. "For the time I'm drawing that person, it's like they're alive again and I'm paying them another visit. That's the only way I can do it that makes any sense to me," he says. Most artists who blow through Detroit end up spitting out the same kind of drive-by ruin porn. But those who live in the city, like Lemenu, have a subtly optimistic way of looking at it. (It's why, in the end, he couldn't see the kid from Detroit getting knocked out by Leonard.) Lemenu watched Gosskie closely during that improbable championship season. "He'd throw these balls that would whack off one ball and whack off another and fall just right. Steve Gosskie was as unlikely as anybody," Lemenu says. "Maybe more than anybody, he needed it."