by Jane Leavy
Curve 16, the last, was called "Thunderbird," in homage to the indigenous people who consider Mount Whistler a "wild spirit place" and also to signify the thunder of sleds crossing the finish line. Just past a blue banner emblazoned with the Olympic rings and the motto "Des plus brillants exploits" ("Ever more brilliant exploits"), Kumaritashvili slammed into the lip of a curve that sneered at sanity. He ricocheted from one iced concrete wall to another like a crash dummy and was thrown out of the track and into a steel pole.
He was traveling 90 miles per hour—20 miles per hour faster than the gold-winning time at Lake Placid. And it was only practice.
"Even at Olympus, speed kills," Powers wrote in the Globe.
One decade into the new millennium the world of sports is in extremis. Everything is more extreme—hits and hip checks, endeavor and entitlement, compensation and consequence. Forget "faster, higher, stronger." Try "deeper, steeper, crazier."
When I signed on for this gig, I expected a full complement of gnarly surfer dude stories and ultra-tortured ultra-marathon confessionals. I didn't expect the death wish that suffuses the language and the actions of so many competitions and competitors: among the stories submitted for consideration this year were tales about high-altitude skiers who take their lives in their hands to ski in the "death zone"; an annual Vermont "Death Race" organized by triathletes whose stated ambition is "to break you"; and a breathtakingly reckless pickup skateboarder named Danny Way.
The need to declare oneself a world champion of something, to create worlds to conquer, even if it means maybe getting killed in the process, has spawned proto-playing fields unheard of when my hero, Red Smith, filed his first piece for the St. Louis Star in 1927—an account of the first night football game at Washington University written from the point of view of a glowworm outshone by the newly installed stadium lights. As Red saw it, his job was to help readers "recapture the fun they had at yesterday's game or find a substitute for the fun they didn't have because they had to go to work instead."
He also said that his job was to provide "momentary pleasure, like a good whore."
By the time I joined the Washington Post sports staff in 1979, Red's Runyonesque notion of sports writing was obsolete. 'Juggling," Robert Lipsyte, then Red's colleague at the New York Times, called it. (Juggling may be the only subject not covered by this year's submissions, which included pinball, bridge, birding, and competitive computer programming.)
Led by a new generation of edgy sportswriters like Lipsyte, we found new purpose in the great issues of the day—race, equal opportunity, drugs, and labor disputes. We became personality journalists, medical writers, and business reporters. Red quit juggling and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for columns devoted to grown-up subjects, including off-track betting, baseball free agency, and Olympic hypocrisy.
The toy department, as he called it, was all grown up.
Today fun is all but gone from the sports page. No one needs us around for a good time with virtual fields of play beckoning at home at the touch of a joystick. Pretty soon no one will feel the need to go to a game because now you can be in a computer-generated game with graphics so graphic, violence so violent, stylin' so stylish, that NFL players have taken to imitating their virtual clones.
Nobody needs us to report any score. With YouTube highlights, streaming video, and 24/7 saturation bombing of Fanboy sensibilities on a proliferating array of dedicated cable channels—MLB, UFC, WWE, Archery TV, Board Riders TV, Fourth and Long, Cricket Ticket, NASCAR HotPass, Golf Bug, Futbol Mundial, not to mention the networks created by teams and for teams, like YES—there's precious little sports left in sports writing.
And precious little news. Team-sponsored websites routinely give access—and scoops—to their own "reporters"—who are quite literally the new "house men," as hacks of old were called. End zone Twitter feeds by athlete auteurs preempt the fastest press box scribes.
Sports journalism is in the midst of an identity crisis so profound that we no longer know whether we're made up of one word or two. "Sportswriting Is One Word," Frank Deford declared in his 2010 Red Smith Lecture in Journalism at Notre Dame. A master of the long form in his glory days at Sports Illustrated, Frank saluted our business as the only journalistic endeavor to merit its own signifier, while mourning the passage of in-depth "takeouts." "Sports stories—two words—are disappearing," he said.
Glenn Stout, the indomitable editor of the Best American Sports Writing series, published by Houghton Mifflin since 1991, prefers two words—sports writing—as does spell-check. "The intention is to celebrate good writing that happens to be about sports," he explains, "rather than 'sportswriting,' a definition which tends to mean sports reporting, usually confined to news stories that appear in newspapers and ... far more narrow in scope."
Red Smith used two words—sports writer—in a 1937 letter to a young man seeking advice on a career in journalism. Decades later he took the opposite approach. In the introduction to an anthology of columns called Strawberries in the Wintertime, he noted that the title "captures, I think, some of the flavor of the sportswriter's existence."
Like losing coaches at halftime, we have adjusted. Sports writing may be as popular as ever, Deford says, but it's as likely to be measured now in characters as in column inches. Newspaper columnists and beat writers have reinvented themselves as prolific bloggers and tweeters, attracting cultlike followers with their digital haiku—not quite what E. B. White meant by the "clear crystal stream of the declarative sentence." (Red considered it part of his job to read Elements of Style every year.)
But long-form sports stories are flourishing in new soil—popping up on new websites where space is infinite and nobody says, "Cut from the bottom." I'm happy that so many of those sources are represented in this collection.
It's anybody's guess how many published words are devoted to sports every year. Two things are for sure: fewer and fewer of them appear in traditional outlets, and Glenn Stout has read more of them than anyone else. He read 10,000 or so stories and sent 71 for my consideration. I lobbied for a couple of others that somehow eluded his in-box—Powers's column about death in Vancouver and two stories from the ABC News series about the sexual molestation of female swimmers by their coaches—because they exemplify the risks and risk-taking behavior that is the subject of so much of today's best sports writing (and sportswriting).
Lunatic endeavor has become ubiquitous, both on and off the field. To wit: an American BASE jumper—BASE stands for "buildings, antennas, spans, and earth"—who makes his leaps in a hand-tailored Italian neoprene suit like "Rocky the Flying Squirrel"; an Austrian free-diver whose ambition is to prove he can descend 20,000 leagues beneath the sea, give or take, without his head exploding; surfers who charge manfully into the waters of a Norwegian fjord in winter in order to be able to say they surfed above the Arctic Circle; English schoolmates who took the treacherous route to the summit "because it was there" and lost their lives on Mont Blanc.
The roster of all-star risk-takers also includes "sexting" quarterbacks, concussed quarterbacks, and the team doctors who send them back into the huddle; bong-sucking swimmers and blood-doping bikers; monied homeys like Marvin Harrison, the wide receiver on the other end of so many Peyton Manning heaves, who can't not go home again; and his extreme opposite, Darryl Dawkins, the first man to go straight from high school to the NBA, "the Man from Lovetron" who took a risk and applied for a job as a college coach.
General managers who pay a gazillion dollars for a .230 shortstop are risk-takers. Owners who shut down the most profitable game in the history of humankind are risk-takers. And truth tellers like Cincinnati Reds manager Dusty Baker are as rare as candor is risky. His admission of the impotence and incontinence caused by prostate cancer surgery—telling Howard Bryant what it's like to wear diapers in a major league clubhouse—was as daring as any daredevil flight of fancy.
Their risk is our salvation.
Red, who called himself "just a boy reporter" u
ntil the day he died, counseled every young writer who'd listen—and who didn't?—"You gotta get the smell of the cabbage cooking in the halls." Some took his advice more literally than others. In 1988 my pal Powers took the trip I declined eight years earlier, rocketing down Mount Van Hoevenberg in a pair of jeans. He likened the journey to "falling off the edge of the 14th-century earth."
Last year one author, in pursuit of a story, "unintentionally pitchforked a load of manure" into his mouth. Jake Bogoch, who grew up playing hockey in western Canada—where, as he writes, "you play until your trajectory stalls or your father allows you to quit"—enrolled in kiddie goon camp and ended up with blood in his urine and "a deep bruise that was larger than a slice of processed cheese."
This is not what Red meant by legwork. But the 29 stories in this collection prove that there are still places only words can take us. The authors in this anthology followed Red's lead down sometimes dark and unlikely corridors, chasing stories about sexual reassignment surgery, intersex athletes, sexual assault, drug addiction, and neurological disorders, including Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.
Techno-gimmicky wizardry can fast-forward, slo-mo, rewind, and record experience. But the right word, still as hard to find as the hole in a slugger's swing, and a perfectly turned phrase as exquisite as any triple lutz can summon a feeling, a place, a moment in time, with irrefutable specificity.
Words can slow the synapses and let us savor those moments, as in "Eight Seconds," Michael Farber's piece about the time it took to score the gold medal-winning goal in hockey in Vancouver. The story is as exceptional as it is an exception. "Consider a moment," he begins. "Now take that moment—maybe the most significant in sports in 2010—and break it down frame by frame into 100 or so smaller moments."
That's what words can do.
Words have the power to change the status quo—as Megan Chuchmach and Avni Patel did by exposing 36 swimming coaches and compelling USA Swimming to change the rules governing the men who coach young women.
Words let us feel what a luger feels after a crash, when ice turns to fire. Words let us hear what people say and let us decide what their words say about them. Red told me years ago, "I crow with pleasure at this kind of usage: 'I know the man that that's the house of's daughter.'" He would have delighted at this from a member of the U.S. National Homeless Soccer Team profiled by Wells Tower, one Jason Moore, who introduces himself at the New York City shelter he calls home as Reverend Pimpin': "Being a reverend, you kind of learn to be pimpalicious."
Courtly as he was, Red would have recoiled at Ben Roethlisberger's crude barroom command cited by Sally Jenkins: "All my bitches, take some shots!" But he would have recognized the ugly truth of entitlement in the language of a quarterback accustomed to barking orders at the line of scrimmage and having them obeyed.
Words give us access to unknown territory—a crash site revisited 40 years later, the habitat of America's dwindling population of wild mustangs, the workshop of a master carver of Native American lacrosse sticks. And words fill the interior places in the heart and soul. Here is the ineffable John McPhee describing a last visit to the hospital to see his dying father. "I looked out the window for a time, at Baltimore, spilling over its beltway. I looked back at him. Spontaneously, I began to talk. In my unplanned, unprepared way, I wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on filling it, to no apparent purpose but, I suppose, a form of self-protection."
Sometimes words just plain take your breath away.
These 29 stories represent a panoply of excellence, reporting, and tone. They are by turns melodic, comedic, elegiac, and always idiosyncratic. I resolved to have as many voices heard as possible, eliminating some otherwise worthy picks because I had already chosen another piece by the author. Glenn dutifully removed the author's name and publication from the weighty batches that thudded at my front door. But some of the voices were so distinct, I recognized them anyway.
Voices of conscience: Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, my pick for the best sports columnist writing today, and Selena Roberts of Sports Illustrated. It's no coincidence, I think, that two of the strongest voices in these pages belong to women writing about issues affecting women that wouldn't have made the agate page in Red's day.
Voices of whimsy: P. J. O'Rourke's lessons on child-rearing as gleaned from a 1961 field dog manual; Yoni Brenner's hilarious send-up of the verbal grandiosity of Any Given Sunday in the NFL. The last of his "Trick Plays" gives a whole new meaning to a Hail Mary pass: "In the waning seconds of the first half of the NFC championship game, the pious visiting quarterback leads a masterly 80-yard drive, culminating in a 15-yard touchdown strike. As his teammates celebrate, the quarterback drops to one knee to thank Jesus. Just then, the Rapture comes, and the quarterback is instantly beamed up to Heaven, leaving only his cleats behind."
Voices of grace: Mark Pearson writes of his cauliflower ear, a legacy of his college wrestling days and the love of the sport he inherited from his father. The burdens bequeathed by fathers (present, omnipresent, jailed, dead, remembered) are the subtext of this and so many other stories. Pearson's father taught him to wrestle with pain and left him glad to be the father of daughters. "As much joy and pride as there is between a father and a son, I don't know that I could endure much more of the unspoken pain that marks the lives of fathers and sons."
Voices that expose just how far otherwise rational people will go to win: Bill Shaikin introduces us to Vladimir Shpunt, an émigré Russian physicist hired by baseball's former power couple, Frank and Jamie McCourt, to help the Dodgers win by sending positive energy over great distances. From his living room in Boston. Via cable TV. No word who got custody of him in the divorce.
Voices that speak to the enduring importance of having a voice: Bill Plaschke's autobiographical ode to an old-fashioned notebook that gave a stuttering young boy a voice he didn't know he had speaks volumes about the enduring import of words.
Together, and in unexpected harmony, these 29 voices are sports writing's Greek chorus, by turns singing the praises of risk-takers and bearing witness to risk's pathological excess. On principle, I declined to include any of the multitudinous entries, no matter how well executed, detailing the sexploitation of others by risk-takers named Brett and Tiger. I also eliminated stories about women—racecar driver Danica Patrick and a whole roster of scantily clad femme fatale football players—who allow the sexploitation of themselves.
The need to risk self and sanity was the subject of many of this year's best submissions. Craig Vetter's admirably restrained profile of BASE jumper Dean Potter in Playboy reveals a man unable to accept the limits of humanity. Potter isn't satisfied with having flown four miles at 120 miles per hour with a parachute strapped to his back. No, he aims to fly without his hand-tailored Italian wingsuit or a parachute and walk away—like my pal Powers—in a pair of jeans.
Vetter sets the only appropriate tone for such a story—deadpan.
Bret Anthony Johnston sees art and aspiration—Pablo Picasso and Mike Tyson—in the daredevil skateboarder Danny Way, broken in so many places and in so many ways, "pushing not merely the limits of skateboarding but the boundaries of the human spirit, the soul."
The cultivation of confected risk in extremely extreme sports—and the astonishing number of stories devoted to those pursuits—may say something about how far we've come as a species, with leisure time to kill, disposable income to spend, and complacency to defy. It says as much about how far we have to go.
As I whittled and fiddled, and read and reread, the earth opened up and swallowed Japan. Neptune reared his gnarly head and let loose an epic wave that was definitely not surfable. Those running for their lives did not have to pay an entry fee for this "Death Race."
I wondered how those images registered, if they registered, with the corporately funded, apparel-endorsing, move-busting, family-busting, serotonin-depleted thrill-seekers who push the extremes of extreme. Do these explorers of human
possibility know there was a guy named Magellan who navigated uncharted waters without GPS?
I wanted to tell Danny Way to read Mark Kram's series for the Philadelphia Daily News about a young boxer killed in the ring who became an organ donor and saved five lives. I wanted to tell Austrian aqua man Herbert Nitsch to read Chris Ballard's ode to a dying coxswain, Jill Costello, who steered her last race less than a month before her death from lung cancer. I wanted to tell Dean Potter to read Wright Thompson's homage to the soccer-playing Chilean miners whose old teammates joined the dusty vigil aboveground because, as one said, "we are not friends just of games. We are friends of the heart."
In its own decidedly nonlethal way, writing is also a kind of risk: these guys take their lives in their hands, and we take their lives in ours when we choose what to reveal about them—and sometimes about ourselves. Nancy Hass's elegy to Mike Penner, a longtime writer for the Los Angeles Times, should be required reading for all the leapers, sliders, skaters, and divers who leap, slide, skate, and dive in the name of human fulfillment. Penner risked everything to become the woman he knew himself to be, revealing to his readers that the Old Mike was now the New Christine. In her debut at a press conference introducing David Beckham to L.A., Christine wore "a golden-hued top from Ross and a multi-colored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed heels from Aerosoles." In the end, she was unable to live in her new skin. The life and death of Mike Penner/Christine Daniels bears witness to just how far human beings will go to become fully themselves and the limits that fate places on the enterprise.
Mike/Christine's last byline was a suicide note. Hass writes: "For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports: Christine Daniels, the woman he became for 18 months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions."
