The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  “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 fic
tion, 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.

  Here ends the lamentation, on this faintly upbeat note. All the uncertainty and gloom in the atmosphere added a dash of bravery, even gallantry, to every piece of sports writing I read, and gave an extra zing to the very best. I remember, while I was working with Andre Agassi on his memoir, the deadline was drawing near, the stress was running high, and I said something Andre liked, made a suggestion with which he wholly agreed. Suddenly he shouted: I don’t know whether to kiss you or knock you out! I never understood exactly what he meant, but I think it had to do with that visceral reaction, that reflex of tenderness and vehemence we all experience when, just in time, the right words hit our inner target. At some point, while reading every piece in this book, that’s what I felt. Bull’s-eye.

  For example, Jonathan Segura. As I read the first few lines of his piece it was late, I was dead tired, and then all at once I wasn’t. I was out of my chair, pacing, laughing, clenching and unclenching my fists. In particular I want to single out Segura’s lush and wanton profanity. I hope it shocks and mortifies every scold out there who’s forever bitching about bad language. My philosophy: if you don’t like bad language, don’t use it. And if you can’t rejoice in the life force pulsing through every lovely four-letter word in Segura’s paean to his soccer-loving mate (“Whatever he did, he did the shit out of”), then you and I are probably not going to be able to hang out.

  I’ll admit, I dropped a few f-bombs while reading Wright Thompson’s piece. Thompson is quietly becoming a one-man dynasty in the world of sports writing. He made last year’s BASW, he’s already reserved a spot in next year’s, and he wrote several pieces that could have been selected for this year’s. Faced with too many choices, I picked his epic portrait of Urban Meyer, a football coach driven, and nearly destroyed, by perfectionism. (Savor that incredible opening passage, in which the coach’s daughter, and Thompson, bravely call out the coach.) Two other perennial All-Stars, Thomas Lake and Chris Ballard, weigh in with pieces that feel linked. Lake, employing just the right pathos-to-restraint ratio, tells the story of a high school basketball player who died shortly after making a game-winning shot. Ballard, with a novelist’s sense of scene and pace, describes a high school baseball team that went on an impossible run after one of its players died in a car wreck. I will not soon forget the team bus wending its way home from the tournament, stopping at the cemetery, where the boys, hats off, observe a moment of silence.

  I chose a few pieces more for their solid reporting, like Kent Babb’s cold-blooded exposé of the gulag that was the 2012 Kansas City Chiefs. More than one NFL team is ruled by control freaks obsessed with secrecy, drunk with power, but my mouth hung open as I read about general manager Scott Pioli’s brief reign of terror on Arrowhead Drive. The head coach running around thinking his office is bugged? The team president using a discarded candy wrapper as a “coaching moment”? Come on, guys. Get a grip.

  In a year filled with downers, several pieces provided some badly needed levity, like Erik Malinowski’s kooky analysis of one seminal sitcom episode, which cast real baseball players as themselves and thereby changed the way we think about both national pastimes—baseball and TV. Bill Littlefield might have scored the year’s funniest line in his piece about a wayside boxing gym in Pittsburgh. (What the ring card girl asks the gym owner—I guffawed aloud.) And Jeff MacGregor slayed me with his Godot-esque goof on Roger Goodell. If some readers don’t get it, wonderful. Here’s hoping they’ll be motivated to read some Beckett.

  Pound for pound, the funniest piece to cross my desk might have been David Simon’s tribute to last summer’s valiant Orioles. The humor is wry, as one would expect from the creator of The Wire, and yet there’s one joyfully silly exchange between Simon and his cousin, a Yankees fan, which ends with Simon texting: “Bite me, O pinstriped whore.” Maybe it’s the Mets fan in me, but I let out a soft, involuntary yeeeah.

  Whenever possible, you want a love story in the mix, and I’m indebted to the incomparable Allison Glock for producing a fine one. Her anatomy of the doomed relationship between two basketball stars, Rosalind Ross and Malika Willoughby, was still on my mind days after I read it. Glock tells a difficult tale with compassion, insight, and her typical unblinking eye for detail. (What the father learns from the mortician—chilling.) A far less complicated love story is Rick Reilly’s piece out of Queen Creek, Arizona. Bullies at the local high school were tormenting Chy Johnson, a mentally handicapped girl, until the football team stepped in. Reilly’s reporting gives some richly deserved dap to Carson Jones, the quarterback, who first invited Chy to sit at his roundtable during lunch. If you’ve read anything in recent months that so sweetly and compactly restored your faith in people, please forward it to me.

  Gary Smith’s delicious piece about a hunger-striking football player hasn’t yet gotten all the huzzahs it deserves, maybe because it’s fearlessly, brazenly political, a no-no in sportswriting, as in sports, which is sort of Smith’s point. A Hall of Famer several times over, Smith shows that he’s not about to stop taking chances. This piece is a high-wire act, filled with risks that would trip up lesser writers, and though I held my breath in several places, Smith makes it safely to the other side.

  Finally, two pieces stand apart for me. The first is Barry Bearak’s. In the copies and printouts sent to me by BASW’s legendary curator, Glenn Stout, the name of every writer was redacted. But I was three pages into the story of Micah True, the mythic runner who vanished in the New Mexico wilderness, when I looked up and thought: Bearak? His style is that Zorro-like, his voice that etched into my memory.

  I had the good fortune of meeting Bearak once. We were both working at the Los Angeles Times, where he was a god, revered for his bravery and linguistic virtuosity. (Pull up his 1992 series on New York City crack addicts. Prepare to be stunned.) The boss invited Bearak to give a lunchtime talk to younger reporters, and I remember us all eagerly squeezing into the conference room, like batboys getting to meet Babe Ruth. I still find myself drawing on things Bearak said that day.

  Many writers could have done something special with the story of True. Only Bearak could have written such a clean, tight yarn, while also finding room for such sparkling imagery. Marijuana “fluted” through True’s head; cold air “scythed” through the forest. I read the piece while drinking coffee, sitting in the sun, but I was high, I was chilled—I was True.

  Lastly, Karen Russell. I want to say it as plainly as I can: her piece about the one-eyed matador ranks with the finest sports writing I’ve ever read. Some will be surprised to discover that Russell isn’t a sportswriter, nor even an occasional writer of sports. She’s a novelist, a short story writer, a rising literary superstar. What I find hard to figure isn’t how Russell writes so masterfully about sports, but when. This piece appeared just months before her acclaimed short story collection dropped, just months after her novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Does the woman sleep?

  The one-eyed matador is Juan Jose Padilla, whose eye was pronged out by an 1,100-pound bull. Russell makes you feel the hideous wound, makes you want to reach up and touch your own eye to be sure it’s still there, then follows Padilla through his healing and improbable comeback. Don’t read the piece once. Read it twice, read it three times, and slow down each time you come to the scene where Padilla stands before a young cow, ready to torear an animal for the first time since his injury. The cow moves forward, Padilla steps aside, and there it is, one man’s quiet triumph over—everything. But especially loss. T
he moment takes place at the end of December, Russell tells us, because Padilla is determined that the year will not end without him dressing again as a bullfighter. His need for the cape, she says, is like “the longing of a ghost recalling its body.”

  Oh, Russell. When I read that line I didn’t know whether to kiss you or knock you out, so I just shook my head and gently placed your piece on top of the yes pile. You were born to be atop the yes pile.

  But that’s the problem. With so much talent, you’ll always be in great demand, pulled in many directions at once. Please, continue to make time now and then for sports. This business needs writers like you, voices like yours, if we’re going to avoid the next sinkhole. And each of us, individually, when we fall in? Masterpieces like the tale of the one-eyed matador can help us cope, and might even inspire us to climb our way out.

  J. R. MOEHRINGER

  KAREN RUSSELL

  The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador

  FROM GQ

  I. Zaragoza, Spain—October 7, 2011

  WHAT DOES THE bull see as it charges the matador? What does the bull feel? This is an ancient mystery, but it seems like a safe bet that to this bull, Marques—ashy black, five years old, 1,100 pounds—the bullfighter is just a moving target, a shadow to catch and penetrate and rip apart. Not a man with a history, not Juan Jose Padilla, the Cyclone of Jerez, 38 years old, father of two, one of Spain’s top matadors, taking on his last bull of the afternoon here at the Feria del Pilar, a hugely anticipated date on the bullfighting calendar.

  When Marques comes galloping across the sand at Padilla, the bullfighter also begins to run—not away from the animal but toward its horns. Padilla is luminously scaled in fuchsia and gold, his “suit of lights.” He lifts his arms high above his head, like a viper preparing to strike. For fangs, he has two wooden sticks with harpoonlike barbs, two banderillas, old technologies for turning a bull’s confusion into rage. Padilla and Marques are alone in the sandy pit, but a carousel of faces swirls around them. A thousand eyes beat down on Padilla, causing sweat to bead on his neck. Just before Marques can gore him, he jumps up and jabs the sticks into the bull’s furry shoulder. He brings down both sticks at once, an outrageous risk. Then he spins around so that he is facing Marques, running backward on the sand, toe to heel.