by Glenn Stout
ESTRAGON: And now?
VLADIMIR: I question. I dispute. I eluct.
ESTRAGON: What was once indubitable is now dubitable.
VLADIMIR: The whole apparatus is in doubt.
ESTRAGON: Replacement officials?
VLADIMIR: Scabs.
ESTRAGON: The very same! Like a skinned knee!
VLADIMIR: It’s tragedy masquerading as comedy.
ESTRAGON: Comedy rebranded as tragedy.
VLADIMIR: It’s a leaguewide lockout.
ESTRAGON: Union-busting cahoots! The league is in league with The League.
VLADIMIR: The league isn’t the players. The league is the owners.
ESTRAGON: Maybe the league left its wallet in its other pants, because the league needs to scrounge a few dollars.
VLADIMIR: Very few.
ESTRAGON: So the league is using bargain officials from other leagues.
VLADIMIR: From the Lingerie League.
ESTRAGON: Safety first! Who would know better the risks and rules governing high-speed helmet-to-helmet contact and potential brain injury than a back judge from the Lingerie Football League?
VLADIMIR: And at an attractive discount.
ESTRAGON: So except for the absurd incompetence, it’s been a win-win-win right down the line.
VLADIMIR: He’ll have to explain it all to us when he gets here.
ESTRAGON: Who will?
VLADIMIR: Goodell.
ESTRAGON: We’re waiting for Goodell?
VLADIMIR: Yes. He can explain it.
ESTRAGON: Of course he can. Maybe. But can he make good on it?
They wait.
VLADIMIR: In his defense, you can’t be half a gangster.
ESTRAGON: Or even half a Gangnam.
VLADIMIR: Those nickels and dimes add up.
ESTRAGON: Too true.
VLADIMIR: Especially in Las Vegas.
ESTRAGON: Where they gamble on football?
VLADIMIR: Professional American football is the most beloved and lucrative random numbers generator in human history.
Both rise, look up into the lights, and hold their hats over their hearts for a very long time. Their eyes well with tears. They sit again, exhausted.
ESTRAGON: But it has to be on the up-and-up.
VLADIMIR: On the level.
ESTRAGON: On the square.
VLADIMIR: Or it might as well not be football at all.
ESTRAGON: Like operetta, or the New York Jets.
VLADIMIR: Or anything else you can’t reliably bet upon.
ESTRAGON: Because the league sells physical marvels and unbelievable feats of nonfiction.
VLADIMIR: And if people can’t believe them . . .
ESTRAGON: Real trouble.
VLADIMIR: It’s a question of epistemology . . .
ESTRAGON: And the betting lines.
VLADIMIR: Exactly. Goodell has to fix it because all of a sudden it looks fixed.
The sky darkens.
ESTRAGON: Will he never get here?
VLADIMIR: I’m not entirely convinced he ever left.
ESTRAGON: True. He’s everywhere.
VLADIMIR: And nowhere.
ESTRAGON: He’d want us to remember.
VLADIMIR: Remember that it’s slow-motion violence set to music?
ESTRAGON: The very thing. Sentimentalized carnage. The Shield is a cymbal of integrity, after all. And your assurance of highest-quality action.
They sit a long time in silence.
VLADIMIR: Still. It’s not a strike.
ESTRAGON: It’s a lockout.
VLADIMIR: Time to shake off the dust. Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Curtain
Contributors’ Notes
KENT BABB is a sports enterprise writer for the Washington Post, which he joined in October 2012 after spending the previous five years covering the NFL and writing columns and longform pieces for the Kansas City Star. He also has worked for The (Columbia, South Carolina) State. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, he lives in northern Virginia with his wife, Whitney.
CHRIS BALLARD is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He is the author of three books, including The Art of a Beautiful Game and One Shot at Forever, about the 1971 Macon Ironmen baseball team. A graduate of Pomona College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and two daughters. This is his third appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
BARRY BEARAK joined the New York Times sports staff in late 2011 after many years as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2002 for stories from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has twice received the George Polk Award, once for his coverage from Afghanistan and then, along with his wife Celia Dugger, for work from Zimbabwe. Bearak, a Pulitzer finalist in feature writing, has also been a staff writer for the New York Times Sunday Magazine and a visiting professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was raised in the Chicago area and attended Knox College and the University of Illinois.
BURKHARD BILGER has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2001. Bilger’s work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine,the New York Times,the New York Times Book Review, and numerous other publications and has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best Food Writing, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Bilger’s book Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern Comforts was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
BILL GIFFORD has been an editor at Philadelphia and Men’s Journal, and his work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Outside, Wired, Men’s Health, and Bicycling. He is at work on a book about the future of medicine.
ALLISON GLOCK is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker, among many others. She is a senior staff writer for ESPN, a columnist at Southern Living, and a contributing editor at Garden & Gun. Her memoir of her grandmother won the Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
PATRICK HRUBY is a writer for Sports on Earth and a contributor to Washingtonian magazine and The Atlantic online. He has worked for ESPN.com and the Washington Times and taught journalism at Georgetown University. He holds degrees from Georgetown and Northwestern and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Saphira. This is his fourth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
DAN KOEPPEL lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife and son. His most recent book is Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. In his spare time, he organizes marathon walking events. His website is www.dankoeppel.com.
THOMAS LAKE is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and a graduate of Gordon College. This is his fourth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
From WBUR in Boston, BILL LITTLEFIELD hosts National Public Radio’s weekly sports magazine program, Only A Game. He was the guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing in 1998 and is the author of six books, including the novels Prospect and The Circus in the Woods. He is writer-in-residence at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts.
JEFF MACGREGOR is a senior writer for ESPN and the author of Sunday Money.
ERIK MALINOWSKI is a senior writer for BuzzFeed Sports. He has previously been the night editor of Deadspin.com and the sports editor of Wired.com. A graduate of Boston University with a degree in journalism, he lives with his wife, Rebecca, in San Mateo, California.
MICHAEL J. MOONEY is a staff writer at D Magazine. He also writes for GQ, Outside, SBNation.com/Longform, and Grantland.com. He is a graduate of the Mayborn School of Journalism and is on the advisory committee of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. His stories have appeared in The Best American Crime Reporting and multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He
lives in Dallas with his fiancée, Tara, and their retired racing greyhound.
NICOLE PASULKA is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been published in The Believer, Salon.com, Mother Jones, and the Globe and Mail. You can find her online at www.nicolepasulka.com.
BRIDGET QUINN has written a memoir, Home Team, about growing up in a big Montana family and becoming a new kind of woman in the American West. Three excerpts from the book have appeared in Narrative magazine, including the piece here, “At Swim, Two Girls,” and “One-on-One,” which was noted in The Best American Sports Writing 2010. Her essay “Back in the Pool” was a finalist for the 2006 Annie Dillard Prize in Creative Nonfiction. A grateful denizen of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where she works, she lives in San Francisco with her husband Rick, a cyclist; her son Lukas, an avid surfer; and her daughter Zuzu, a goal-scoring soccer machine.
RICK REILLY is a columnist for ESPN.com and an essayist for ESPN SportsCenter. From 1985 until 2007, he was a writer for Sports Illustrated. He is the author of 10 books, including Sports from Hell: My Search for the World’s Dumbest Competition. He served as guest editor for The Best American Sports Writing 2002 and lives in Denver.
CINTHIA RITCHIE writes and runs mountains in Anchorage, Alaska. She is the recipient of two Rasmuson Individual Artist Awards, a Connie Boochever fellowship, residencies at Hedgebrook, Hidden River Arts, and Kimmel Nelson Harding Center for the Arts, and the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize, the Memoir Grand Prize, and a Sport Literate Essay Award. Readers can find her work in the New York Times Magazine, Under the Sun, Water-Stone Review, Memoir, Sport Literate,the Boiler Journal, damselfly press, Third Wednesday, Foliate Oak Literary Review, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, The Quivering Pen, 42opus, Sugar Mule, Cactus Heart Press, Evening Street Review, and others. She is also the author of a novel, Dolls Behaving Badly.
KAREN RUSSELL is the author of the story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Swamplandia!, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the New York Times’s Top Five Fiction Books of 2011. Her new story collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, was released in February 2013.
JASON SCHWARTZ is a senior editor at Boston magazine, where he has covered sports, politics, business, and education since 2007. His writing has also appeared in ESPN: The Magazine, Slate, the Boston Globe, and other places.
JONATHAN SEGURA is the author of Occupational Hazards and has written for GQ and National Public Radio.
CHARLES SIEBERT, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, is the author of Rough Beasts: The Zanesville Zoo Massacre, One Year Later.
DAVID SIMON is an author, a journalist, and a writer/producer of the HBO television series The Wire. He formerly worked for the Baltimore Sun and is the author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and, with Ed Burns, of The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.
MARK SINGER has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974 and is author of the books Funny Money, Mr. Personality, a collection of his reporting from The New Yorker, Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin, and two more collections, Somewhere in America and Character Studies. He lives in New York.
GARY SMITH is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. His stories have appeared in The Best American Sports Writing more often than those of any other writer. A graduate of La Salle University, he wrote for the Wilmington News-Journal, the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York Daily News, and Inside Sports before coming to Sports Illustrated. His writing has also appeared in Time, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. A collection of his work, Beyond the Game, was published in 2001.
PAUL SOLOTAROFF is the author of The Body Shop, Group, and House of Purple Hearts. A contributing editor at Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone, he has written features for Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, and the New York Times Magazine. This is his eighth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in New York.
WRIGHT THOMPSON is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN: The Magazine. He lives with his wife, Sonia, in Oxford, Mississippi. This is his eighth appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
Notable Sports Writing of 2012
SELECTED BY GLENN STOUT
JOHN AKERS
Who Is Rick Ray? Basketball Times, September 2012
CHRIS FELICIANO ARNOLD
Asleep at the Roger Clemens Trial. Salon.com, June 10, 2012
BEN AUSTEN
The Glorious Plight of the Buffalo Bills. Grantland.com, November 7, 2012
JIM BAUMBACH
Falling Star. Newsday, December 2, 2012
ADEMOLA BELLO
Crossed Countries. Anchorage Press, March 15, 2012
ALEX BELTH
The Two Rogers. SBNation.com/Longform, October 24, 2012
GREG BISHOP
In Next Scene. The New York Times, December 30, 2012
SAM BORDEN
A Soccer Prodigy, at Home in Brazil. The New York Times, July 9, 2012
FLINDER BOYD
The Ricky Rubio Experience. TheClassical.org, November 28, 2012
JOHN BRANCH
Snow Fall. The New York Times, December 20, 2012
WILLIAM BROWNING
Coach. SBNation.com/Longform, October 9, 2012
MATT CALKINS
Suicide Story Hits Close to Home. The Columbian, May 4, 2012
MATT COKER
The Lost Boys of Summer. OC Weekly, March 30, 2012
JORDAN CONN
Let It Fly. Grantland.com, August 20, 2012
MATT CROSSMAN
A Time to Heal. The Sporting News, December 2012
BRYAN CURTIS
No Chattering in the Press Box. Grantland.com, May 2, 2012
On the Trail of the Piggyback Bandit. Grantland.com, July 11, 2012
DAVID DAVIS
Still Richard. SBNation.com/Longform, November 29, 2012
MARK DENT
Everybody’s Doing the Tweener. TheClassical.org, May 10, 2012
TOM DINARD
Sunlight for a Moonlight Man. ThePostGame.com, January 17, 2012
DAN ENGLAND
Getting Back into the Stroke of Things. The Greeley Tribune, November 25, 2012
KATE FAGAN
Dream Role. ESPNW.com, October 18, 2012
BRUCE FELDMAN
The Middle Man. CBSSports.com, September 21, 2012
NATHAN FENNO
A Trip Back in Time. The Washington Times, October 5, 2012
Peter Frick-Wright
Their Vision Is Sound. Bike, July 2012
STEVE FRIEDMAN
Meteor. Runner’s World, December 2012
DAVE GESSNER
Ultimate Glory. BillandDavesCocktailHour.com, January 26, 2012
BRETT HABER
In the Name of the Father. Washingtonian, March 2012
ERIC HANSEN
Quoosiers. Outside, June 2012
JUSTIN HECKERT
The Loneliest Number. Sports Illustrated, December 31, 2012
MIKE HEMBREE
A Tree Grows in Stuart. Speed.com, September 18, 2012
JUSTICE B. HILL
Saving His Own Soul First. SBNation.com/Longform, December 19, 2012
EVA HOLLAND
Three Kites on the Ice. VelaMag.com, August 28, 2012
PATRICK HRUBY
Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare. SportsonEarth.com, December 12, 2012
The Truth Out There. ThePost Game.com, May 30, 2012
PAT JORDAN
In Uncle Ted’s Head. Roopstigo.com, October 2012
JENNIFER KAHN
Born to Run Back. Runner’s World, January 2012
ZAK KEEFER
One in a Million Shot. The Indianapolis Star, December 9, 2012
KIBBY KLEIMAN
Moneyball 2.0. The East Bay Express, September 12, 2012
MICHAEL KRUSE
The Fabulous Sports Babe. Grantland.com, September 11, 2012
THOMAS LAKE
