The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (2 page)

 

Each year I read every issue of hundreds of sports and general- interest magazines in search of writing that might merit inclusion in
The Best American Sports Writing
. I also write or email the editors of many hundreds of newspapers and magazines and request submissions, and I send email notices to hundreds of readers and writers whose addresses I have accumulated over the years. I search for writing all over the Internet and make regular stops at online sources like
Sportsdesk.org
,
Gangrey.com
,
Byliner.com
,
Longreads.com
,
Longform.org
,
TheFeature.net
, and other sites where notable sports writing is presented or discussed. What these sources turn up is still less than satisfactory, so each year I also encourage everyone—readers and writers, friends and family, enemies and editors—to send me stories they believe should appear in this volume. Writers, in particular, are encouraged to submit—do not shy away from sending me either your own work or the work of others for consideration.

All submissions to the upcoming edition must be made according to the following criteria. Each story

 

• must be column-length or longer.
  
• must have been published in 2013.
  
• must not be a reprint or book excerpt.
  
• must be published in the United States or Canada.
  
• must be received by February 1, 2014.
  

 

All submissions from either print or online publications
must be made in hard copy
and should include the name of the author, the date of publication, and the publication name and address. Photocopies, tear sheets, or clean copies are fine. Readable reductions to 8½-by-11 are preferred. Newspaper submissions should be a photocopy of the hard copy as originally published—not a printout. Since newsprint can suffer in transit, newspaper stories are best copied and made legible. If the story also appeared online, inclusion of the appropriate URL is often helpful. While there is no limit to the number of submissions either an individual or a publication may make, please use common sense. Because of the volume of material I receive, no submissions can be returned or acknowledged, and it is inappropriate for me to comment on or critique any submission. Publications that want to be absolutely certain their contributions are considered are advised to provide a complimentary subscription to the address listed below. Those that already do so should extend the subscription for another year.

All submissions must be made by U.S. mail—weather conditions in midwinter here at
BASW
headquarters mean I often cannot receive submissions sent by UPS or FedEx. Electronic submissions by any means—by email or Twitter—or URLs or PDFs or documents of any kind are not acceptable; please submit hard-copy printouts only. The February 1 deadline is real and work received after that date will not be considered.

Please submit either an original or a clear paper copy of each story, including publication name, author, and date the story appeared, to:

 

• Glenn Stout
  
• PO Box 549
  
• Alburgh, VT 05440
  

 

Those with questions or comments may contact me at
[email protected]
. Copies of previous editions of this book can be ordered through most bookstores or online book dealers. An index of stories that have appeared in this series can be found at my website,
glennstout.net
, as can full instructions on how to submit a story. For updated information, readers and writers are also encouraged to join the
Best American Sports Writing
group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter
@GlennStout
.

Thanks again go out to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who supports this book, to guest editor J. R. Moehringer, and to Siobhan and Saorla, who remind me to keep everything neatly stacked. Each year I am gratified to learn how much this book means to the writers who have graced its pages. Serving you is an ongoing privilege.

G
LENN
S
TOUT

Alburgh, Vermont

I
WAS A FLEDGLING REPORTER
in Denver, and the fledgling Colorado Rockies were just entering their first season. At the start of spring training the team looked over its talent-thin roster and sent out a desperate announcement, an unprecedented cry for help. Open tryouts. Come one, come all.

They came. From every corner of America, by every kind of vehicle (cars, buses, skateboards, motorcycles with sidecars), they descended just after dawn on a public park outside Tucson. Fat guys, skinny guys, old guys, drunk guys, guys limping like Fred Sanford—they were all so different, but they all had one thing in common. They'd always wanted to play in the majors, and they saw this as their last, best hope, their
American Idol
moment.

None had a shot. But a few at least had some justification (decent physique, expensive gear) for being there. I carved one out of this herd, a lanky young cowboy type. He told me that he'd driven all night from some small town in some sparsely populated state. I asked why. In a raw early-morning whisper he told me this was his dream, and he and his kid sister had been working hard for months to make it come true.

“You and your sister?”

Sis stepped forward. “Yes, sir. When he throws, I'm the batter. He hums it up there around 90 miles
per
.”

She was a slip of a thing, thin as a paper straw. Late teens, tops. “He throws full speed?” I said. “With you in the batter's box?”

“Almost took my head clean off the other day,” she said.

“Oh. The ball sailed on him?”

“No, sir. He threw it right at me.”

“He threw at his own sister? In practice?”

She looked at me with teenage eye-rolling annoyance. Clearly I didn't get it. “I was
crowdin'
the
plate
,” she said.

I looked at Big Bro. He was staring gravely at Sis. He turned and stared gravely at me. He may or may not have been gnawing a matchstick. I don't remember what he said then, but his wind-chiseled expression said:
This is damn serious business, Mister
.

Damn right it is. The more serious life gets, the more seriously we take sports.

Some take it too seriously, of course, which is the downside of sports writing. Fans these days seem more emotionally invested than ever before, to an unhealthy degree. They seem to derive more of their essential identity from the teams they follow, the jerseys they wear. Maybe it's the waning of other identity sources—family, society, religion, nature, jobs. But that still doesn't adequately explain the waves of outrage, the eruptions of anguish and toxic hubris triggered by the latest setback or defeat of the home team, or by the most recent disrespect in the media. I interviewed a popular athlete not long ago and wrote a profile in which I said some things that offended his fans. I also managed to rile up his detractors. Their online comments read like the lost haiku of Hannibal Lecter. Except that Dr. Lecter was educated. He knew how to spell
hate
and
murder
. As I shut off the computer—confused, alarmed—I asked myself, not for the first time,
Why do I do this?

I don't know. Even on good days I have trouble answering that basic question. When it's posed by someone at a dinner or cocktail party, usually with dripping condescension (“So—why sports?”), I find myself groping for the right words, speaking in abstractions, mumbling about W. C. Heinz and Jimmy Cannon and other boyhood heroes who swung words as powerfully and gracefully as athletes swing bats and fists. Sometimes I explain that I'm not
technically
a sportswriter, I'm a writer who writes about sports now and then, which sounds irrelevant, and vaguely sketchy, like saying, “I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”

In fact it's a meaningful distinction. I tried to be a full-time sportswriter once, and didn't get the job. So I became a generalist, and as such I'd catch the occasional assignment to write a sports feature. For me, for my temperament, it turned out to be the best of all worlds. A baseball beat writer once warned me that covering baseball every single day will cure you of your love of baseball, quick. At the time I thought he was just being grumpy; now I see the wisdom. Writing about sports occasionally, by chance, by choice, has helped preserve my perspective, my wonder, my love.

I don't use that word casually. I
do
love sports, with a wide-eyed openness I haven't quite outgrown. Maybe that's what I'll say the next time someone asks. When everything falls into place, when the interviews click, when the structure works, when the athlete or coach says something real, the boorish fans don't matter, and the job isn't a job, it's a labor of the purest love.

Also, at such in-the-zone moments, the piece isn't just about sports. It's about loss.

Though every competition, from aikido to Xbox, is at surface about winning, it's the losing that matters in the end, because we're all going to lose more than we win. Our bedrock task as human beings is coping with loss, the knowledge of it, the memory of it, the imminence of it, and sports have the power to show us, starkly, bracingly, how. Sports are a theater of loss, of struggle and despair, of real pain and real blood and primal disappointment, which is why the best sports writing seems to reach back, back, like a discus thrower, and touch the ancient myths. The Greeks were perhaps the first people to fetishize both sports and stories. They believed that sports and stories make us more human
and
more divine. Sure, this isn't always true. Not every story can be mythic, not every game is game seven. But on any given day, in the most mundane newspaper feature, in the most meaningless midseason game, there can be a moment of transcendence, a flash of genuine magic, which hints at all the possibilities. That's what keeps you engaged, keeps you in your seat.

Okay, so maybe I'm one of those who take it all too seriously.

It's more fashionable these days to take nothing seriously. Irony was declared dead some years ago, but like the stock market it keeps roaring back. If some fans are too serious, some sportswriters are too cynical; they treat their subject with a strange amalgam of avidity and mockery. Cover the games, analyze every atom and particle of the games, but never miss an opportunity to assert their unimportance, to rip all the money and the narcissism. While I can't deny that some of the richest, most narcissistic people I've ever met have been athletes (and their handlers), it's equally true that some of the most beautiful moments I've ever witnessed have been in arenas—and, my God, don't we need all the beauty we can get? The air is full of carbon dioxide, the water is full of chlorine and melted antidepressants, the body politic is in a deep, deep coma. So I can't give in to irony and cynicism, not all the way, and when asked to serve as editor of this marvelous anthology, I can't approach the task with anything but great seriousness.

Also, some dread. Though I'm pleased to have a chance to honor 25 excellent writers, I hate that I'll be leaving out many more. Like Kevin van Valkenburg. He wrote a gutsy, heartfelt essay about a semipro football player who died from a freak hit. And Ben Austen. He wrote a very funny ode to beleaguered fans of the Buffalo Bills. Both pieces were in the running until the last minute, and I want to assure both writers, and the reader, that they were omitted only because something had to be.

 

Before offering a few reasons and endorsements for several of the pieces I did pick, some housekeeping. It's become a tradition among editors of this anthology, right about here, to take stock of the precarious state of sports writing and issue some form of lamentation. I vowed I wasn't going to follow in that tradition . . . and then my mind kept going there. Ultimately I decided that it's not possible, and maybe not advisable, to introduce the year's best sports writing without at least acknowledging the adverse conditions under which it was produced, and to that end let me briefly mention the man in the sinkhole.

I think about the man in the sinkhole all the time. I'm haunted by him, actually, though he's already faded from the collective unconscious. (He was the Story Of The Year for days, until the next SOTY came along.) By most accounts he was home, fast asleep, when a 60-foot hole opened in the floor and swallowed him, along with his pillow and his blanket and his headboard and his bed and much of his bedroom. One minute the man was dreaming, snoring, and the next he was plunging down a chasm, luging toward the earth's core. His body will never be found. Too far down, rescuers said. Too risky. All they could do was knock over what remained of the house and fill in the hole and tell everyone to go on about their business.

Though he seems like a creation of Kafka, or Camus, or Vonnegut, or the Brothers Grimm, the man in the sinkhole strikes me as the paradigmatic figure of our time. Does it not feel many days as if the ground beneath us is opening, or is just about to? As if modern life is a patchwork of potential sinkholes on which we're forced to play hopscotch and Twister? And with sportswriters—writers of any kind, but our focus here is sports—does it not feel as if the Internet is the deepest, darkest sinkhole imaginable? It threatens to swallow everything we care about: newspapers, magazines, books, bookstores, theaters, publishing houses, films.

Optimists assure us that one day from this yawning sinkhole a wondrous beanstalk will go shooting into the sky, that if we can just grab a leaf or branch and hang on we'll all be dancing in the digitized, monetized clouds. But until then we must stand our ground, our terribly unstable ground. We must write and write, as best we can, knowing our readers and publications may be gone tomorrow. Hell, knowing
we
may be gone tomorrow.

And it's not just the Internet. More worrisome than technological changes in how we read is the continuing decline of reading in general, especially the reading of fiction, especially among males of the species. The last numbers I saw showed that 80 percent of fiction readers are now women. Of the many death knells tolling for this business, to my ears that's the loudest. You can't fully appreciate sports unless you have a sense of narrative, and of character, and of empathy, and you can't have a sense of narrative, or character, nor can you be fully empathetic, if you don't read fiction—just my opinion. If present trends continue, I don't see how sports writing, as I've always known it, and cherished it, can endure.