by Glenn Stout
That has been the case again this year with guest editor Howard Bryant, who made several wise picks of his own. I have known Howard as a friend since he covered technology for the San Jose Mercury News nearly 20 years ago, and working with him on this project was a real pleasure. We first spoke when he called me to discuss a project he was working on, one that eventually sent him to the baseball beat and became his first book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. Three and a half hours later, I hung up the phone and had a feeling we’d be talking again. It’s been a real pleasure to watch his career grow and flourish at the Bergen Record, the Boston Herald, the Washington Post, and now at ESPN, and to read a series of increasingly important books he’s written, including his account of the PED era of baseball, Juicing the Game, and his biography of Henry Aaron, The Last Hero. For a number of years I’ve been hoping my publisher would invite Howard to serve as guest editor (that decision has never been mine to make), and I was elated when it finally happened. The words of our initial conversation took wing and now, almost two decades later, have finally landed us as partners in these pages.
Each year I read hundreds of sports and general-interest newspapers and magazines in search of work that might merit inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing. I also look for high-quality writing across a wide variety of online outlets and make regular stops at aggregators such as Longreads.com, Longform.org, and other similar sites where significant sports writing is often noted. I also make periodic open requests through Twitter and Facebook and contact editors and writers from many outlets to request submissions. As always, and because this book really belongs to the reader, I encourage submissions from anyone who cares about good writing—including readers. The process is open to all. And for the 27th time, not only is it okay to submit your own work, but it is actually encouraged. Neither the guest editor nor I can consider work we do not see.
All submissions to the upcoming edition need only adhere to the publisher’s criteria for eligibility, which also appear here each year, on my own website (www.glennstout.net), and on the Facebook page for The Best American Sports Writing. Each story:
Must be column-length or longer
Must have been published in 2017
Must not be a reprint or a book excerpt
Must have been published in the United States or Canada
Must be postmarked by February 1, 2018
All submissions from either print or online publications must be made in hard copy (submission of only a link or a bibliographic citation is not acceptable), and each should include the name of the author, the date of publication, and the publication title and address. Photocopies, tear sheets, or clean copies are fine. Readable 8½ × 11 reproductions are preferred. Submissions of newspaper articles should be a hard copy or a copy of the article as originally published—not a printout of the web version. Individuals and publications should please use common sense when submitting multiple stories. Owing to 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. Magazines that want to be absolutely certain that 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—midwinter weather conditions often prevent me from easily receiving UPS or FedEx submissions. Electronic submissions of any kind (email, Twitter, URLs, PDFs) are not acceptable—some form of hard copy only, please. The February 1 postmark deadline is real, and work received after that date may not be considered.
Please submit either an original or clear paper copy of the story, including publication title, author, and publication date, to:
Glenn Stout
PO Box 549
Alburgh, VT 05440
Those with questions or comments may contact me at [email protected]. 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 glennstout.net. For updated information, readers and writers are encouraged to join The Best American Sports Writing group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter @GlennStout.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with guest editor Howard Bryant, and appreciated the opportunity to do this book with a friend and colleague whom I not only admire, but who has helped shape this series and my own story sensibilities for so many years, and who takes his duties and responsibilities as a writer so seriously. Thanks also to those at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have helped with the production of this series, to Siobhan and Saorla for their unwavering faith, and to the many, many friends and writers over the past year who have expressed their understanding and support and continue to produce such vital work in a time that too often favors dogma over discourse. Your words prove otherwise.
Glenn Stout
Alburgh, Vermont
Introduction
After a workout session in Goodyear, Arizona, the spring training home of the Cleveland Indians, a colleague told me he was happy I attended the morning media session with Terry Francona, the Cleveland manager. The reason, he said, was that Tito and I were so familiar with each other that the manager was more relaxed, his interview session was more engaging, and the stories he told were better. Francona and I have known each other now for a decade and a half, from when he served as the Oakland A’s bench coach under Ken Macha in 2003 to being together in Boston during the big years, when the Red Sox won it finally, not once but twice. Journalism is a game of facts but also one of relationships, and when I met Terry for the first time, it was Macha, his longtime friend from their mutual hometown of Pittsburgh, who vouched for me. Once in, I obviously had to prove to Tito I could be trusted, but Macha’s imprimatur gave Tito an initial level of trust toward me that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. I came with good recommendations.
Steroids and performance-enhancing drugs were never far from what I wrote about, which made some people less inclined to talk to me. The only thing treated more like Kryptonite in baseball than being directly associated with PEDs was anyone asking about them. One day at the Red Sox spring training facility in Fort Myers, Florida, Dave Wallace, the Sox pitching coach, introduced me to Sandy Koufax. Naturally, I hung out after the workout to bask in the presence of a legend, and after Koufax left, Francona came over. We sat on a picnic table, and he said, “Tell me about steroids. I swear to you, I’m not paying attention to this stuff. I don’t know what they are, or what they can do. Let’s talk.” And we did. No pen. No pad. No recorder.
When the regular season starts, Sundays are always different from the rest of the week. They are slower, usually a getaway day for at least one team and sometimes both teams in an upcoming series. To accommodate television, baseball has largely shifted from its traditional weekend schedule—a Friday night game followed by Saturday and Sunday day games—to Saturday night games, so everybody on a Sunday morning is just a little more bleary-eyed than usual. One Sunday morning, Tito and I were talking in his office when a nervous Red Sox staffer appeared in his doorway, making frantic signals. There seemed to be a problem with Manny Ramirez, both his best player and biggest headache. Francona got out of his chair.
“Wait here.”
He returned, his olive-skinned face pinkish and reddening.
“Shut the door.”
I did.
“You know what?” he said. “At 7:05, when the game starts, in between the lines making pitching changes, all the stuff the fans drill you for? That’s the easy part. This bullshit? This is the fucking job. Right here. This is what managing is. Putting out fires. Pain in my ass.”
During spring training, Francona conducts his interviews with the writers in the intimacy of the media work room, and my history with him contributed to a lively morning session that day in Goodyear. He was animated and funny about the presidency, hobbled now with two titanium knees, recovering from
hip surgery days after the World Series (“I thought we won I was on so many pain killers”), and poignant about time and age (“When I have to pee, which is frequently now, I gotta give myself a pep talk just to get out of bed”).
A colleague and I left the Indians complex, and walking back to the car, we talked about how different the daily sports job is today from when I left the business technology pages of the San Jose Mercury News and became a full-time baseball writer in 1998. I thought about the night in Kansas City when the A’s lost a tough one to the lowly Royals and Oakland’s gentlemanly manager, Art Howe, who had just undergone laser eye surgery, got so upset he tossed the entire press corps out of his office.
“All right, everybody outta here,” he said. “I’ve given you enough to write a fucking book.”
I remained.
“What are you still doing here? I thought I told you to get out of here.”
“Art, I just wanted to let you know your left eye is bleeding.”
Embarrassed by his cursing, his temper, and the temporary loss of his customary civility, Howe asked me to stay. He cracked open two beers, the Dominican brand Presidente. One for him, one for me. He apologized, and we engaged in an impromptu therapy session at nearly 11:00 p.m. He went on about his too young, undertalented roster and his despotic general manager, Billy Beane, who tormented him every night. I listened.
I thought about Francona, who, like Art Howe (yet another Pittsburgh guy) before him, is one of the great characters and people in the game but who, like virtually every manager in the league, now conducts both his pre- and postgame interviews with the writers at a remove. No longer in his office, as in the old days, Francona fields questions from a podium, with a public relations man nearby. The session is videotaped and broadcasted and live-tweeted, and when it’s over, the manager slips out the door. Gone are the days when the camera lights shut off and the writers and manager just talked, off the record, pens down, recorders off. It was there in those golden sessions, which once were available twice a day, eight months a year, that the players became people and the writing process actually began.
Without those sessions, the job of knowing and understanding and feeling and learning is that much harder. Declining access is the eternal condition of sports writing, but a certain level of access—enabling the great Boston Globe writer Bob Ryan, for instance, to tell enviable stories about interviewing Wilt Chamberlain one-on-one by the pool before a Lakers-Celtics game—is gone, and it’s never coming back.
How, then, in a time of podium interviews and fewer chances to drink a beer in the manager’s office while his laser-repaired eye fills up with blood can writers attain the level of access, trust, and feel required to write the types of stories that have populated The Best American Sports Writing collections for more than a quarter century? Good question. That is the challenge, and the answer is basic: Work harder. Work the room, get those cell numbers, send those texts, and build those relationships, because next-level writing with the kind of space and detail that we all wish we could produce cannot happen without next-level access.
My colleague that day in Goodyear was Dave Sheinin, the terrific Washington Post writer whose profile of Dusty Baker, “A Wonderful Life,” is featured in these pages. It is the detail that makes the story—Dave sitting in Dusty’s kitchen at his home in Sacramento, far removed from the dugout and the field and the grind, as he makes lunch—but it is also the access that separates Sheinin’s story from any other attempt to write about the Nationals’ manager. If Dave isn’t in that kitchen, smelling firsthand the aroma of Dusty’s cooking, the scene fails and the words never find the page.
This distance is reflected in the types of stories selected for a book that celebrates the best American sports writing of the last calendar year. It is ostensibly a book about an industry punctuated by buzzer beaters, sweat, emotion, and reflection, and yet only two selections—Sheinin’s and John Branch’s terrific work on Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr—are in-depth stories of active members of one of the four U.S. professional sports, and both are coaches. None of those in-depth stories are about active players on the field. The players, whether because they’ve chosen to connect directly to the public through social media or The Players’ Tribune or because of distrust or lack of interest, now often wall themselves off from the kind of access that was once a standard of in-season writing and is vital to writing about people in full dimension. The payoff still exists, but at least in this year’s edition of the book it had to wait for players to retire, as shown by both Rick Telander’s hard and frustrated look at William “Refrigerator” Perry and Pat Jordan’s account of his raucous days with Barry Switzer. The people are still there. The stories and spirals are still there, and the writing awaits, but the barriers grow taller.
Yet, this is only a partial lament. It’s supposed to be hard.
Despite the ubiquity of the phrase “stick to sports,” sports has never quite known how to stay in its lane, never allowed itself to be relegated to the kids’ table, even when newspapers would derisively refer to it as the “Toy Department.” Online commenters and fans may rage when the First Amendment collides with first-and-goal, but sports has always told us more about who we are and where we’re going than most care to admit. Some of us want to dip our nachos and watch home runs, while others want athletes to be citizens of the world. In the five years since the death of Travyon Martin and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown at the hands of the police, some athletes (especially some black athletes) have repudiated the old Michael Jordan standard of being apolitical as the commercial dollars roll in, being inoffensive to the mainstream consumer, being oblivious to the black athletic heritage of activism. The year 2016 continued the post-Ferguson awakening on the part of athletes, and Colin Kaepernick’s escalation of that protest, linking the failed relationship between police and the African American community to the failing of the ideals embodied in the American flag, defined a divided country and sports industry. The image of Kaepernick and the other players who followed him taking a knee during the National Anthem was clear, but writing about it was a difficult task that no writer did as well as ESPN’s Bomani Jones in “Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace.”
Where we are now is a scary time: we’re not just living in a dangerous world but in an America that isn’t quite sure if America still means what we once collectively believed it did. The question of who we are also stands at the center of another wonderful piece, “26.2 to Life,” Jesse Katz’s story of the annual marathon within the walls of the federal penitentiary at San Quentin. In this country of mass incarceration and mandatory prison sentences, the question of whether we are a nation of jailers or rehabilitators hovers over Katz’s piece so ubiquitously that he never needs to directly ask it.
Our borders may be open—but then again, they may soon be closed. The notion of America providing a fresh, free new start for citizens from other parts of the world may be an outdated one, but throughout my reading of the submissions to this book it was impossible not to think about the implications of American attitudinal uncertainty for the athletes around the world who view sports as a pathway to America, to the better life, even if sports only provides the springboard to the next phase in a person’s journey. Two stories in particular, the Time/Sports Illustrated dual publication of S. L. Price’s “The Longest Run” and Luke Cyphers and Teri Thompson’s “Lost in America” from Bleacher Report, underscore the new arena of America and the refugee, in which the once-clear happy ending to the story is no longer a given. Reading them anew, it was hard not to wonder if America is still that place of refuge. The journeys of these young basketball and soccer players force us to recalibrate the assumption of America as a welcoming destination, leading us into the different, dystopian space of asking what happens to people arriving in an America that no longer wants them.
It’s not only a dangerous world but a complicated one, and if using sports to cross borders and te
ll larger truths about survival and spirit has always been part of the appeal of the game, its simple notions of meritocracy have also been part of its foundation. Such a notion in a world where identity is addressed with science rips apart those narratives and twists their morality from ostensibly simple to very complicated. Ruth Padawer’s “Too Fast to Be Female” describes another complicated space: sports in a transgendered world. Her story is fascinating for its questions of fairness and ethics and science as sports shifts along gender definitions, but it also reveals something less complicated and more persistent: the aggression and demeaning attitudes toward women practiced by the governing bodies of sport.
There is genuine and legitimate reason to fear for the roots that attracted so many of us to the writing business, and one of the revelations in selecting these pieces was recognizing the economic universe in which they were written. As always, contraction and changes in the media business leave long-form writers vulnerable, especially in a world obsessed with small screens and left-swiping and so much talking on the television screen that we’ve forgotten our primary job as journalists is to listen. When I worked in newspapers and talk of layoffs or buyouts would surface, one piece of advice remained universal: “Stay busy. Make sure you’re in the paper.” That was simple code to produce in volume. “Be in the paper” meant being visible, of not giving the impression that your position—and by extension you—were expendable as the economic guillotine was rolled out of storage. It takes time to write a 4,000-word profile or investigative narrative, time that requires not being in the paper. Thus, profiles and investigative narratives soon were disappearing, not necessarily because the bosses valued them less, but because of your fear that you were valued less, your fear of not having a byline as the list of expendable names was being compiled by your potentially soon-to-be ex-supervisors. In such a climate, the skills and attitude of a beat writer become very marketable: being able to produce daily bylines (be visible!), with no aspirations beyond writing the requisite game story and notes, is both a commodity and a source of cost-efficiency. Beat writing is certainly visible, but it’s also a dead-end job for a writer who’s no longer able to transfer years of relationship-building into, for example, sitting on the front porch with Barry Switzer.
