The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (2 page)

• must be column-length or longer.
  
• must have been published in 2011.
  
• must not be a reprint or book excerpt.
  
• must be published in the United States or Canada.
  
• must be received by February 1, 2012.
  

All submissions must 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 8^- by-11 are preferred. Submissions from online publications must be made in hard copy, and newspaper stories should be submitted in hard copy as published. Since newsprint generally suffers in transit, newspaper stories are best copied and made legible. If the story also appeared online, providing the 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. Due 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. 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 make sure to extend the subscription.

No electronic submissions will be accepted, although stories that only appeared online are eligible. Please send all submissions by U.S. mail—weather conditions in midwinter here at
BASW
headquarters often prevent me from receiving UPS or FedEx submissions. The February 1 deadline has been in place for more than two decades and is not arbitrary.

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

Glenn Stout
PO Box 549
Alburgh, VT 05440

Anyone with questions or comments may contact me at basweditor
@yahoo.com
. 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 through 2011 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.

Thanks again go out to all at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who support this book, and to my family, Siobhan and Saorla, who continue to share our home with its accumulated contents. As always, however, my greatest thanks go to those writers who earned their way into the pages of this edition on the strength of their talent alone—the ability to write words that matter—and not according to any other criteria.

G
LENN
S
TOUT
Alburgh, Vermont

O
NE FROSTBITING AFTERNOON
in February 1980 I stood beside the luge track on Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, contemplating a slip 'n' slide ride down the icy, twisting Olympic chute, the first such facility built in the United States.

I was tempted. After all, I was a proud charter member of the newly formed U.S. Luge Writers Association and a sportswriter on deadline trying to get 16 inches out of
whoosh.
I was also slightly tipsy, thanks to several construction drums full of premixed White Russians (one half-gallon vodka to one half-gallon Kahlua plus eight quarts of milk) hauled to the speed skating oval that morning by a Connecticut milkman in honor of Eric Heiden.

John Powers, my colleague from the
Boston Globe,
gallantly offered to escort me, which would have made us the first and last mixed-doubles luge team in history.

We were stationed at Curve 12, known as "Omega." A couple of bottles of French champagne were buried in the snow at our feet, imported by an Emerson College student who used the money he saved on a discounted ticket ($2 for a $22 ticket) to procure the bubbly. An ambulance was parked opposite us on the other side of Omega.

The pop of the cork punctuated a defining moment of realization. I am not a "because it's there" person, except maybe when it comes to good champagne. My idea of risk is leaving home without a fully charged cell phone. I opted to hold on to the extremities I could no longer feel. Besides, I had already taken my life in my hands for the
Washington Post
by hitching a ride into town from the Albany airport with two KGB agents masquerading as reporters from
Soviet Life
magazine. When the big galoot behind the wheel briefly considered pausing at a four-way stop sign at the crest of a hill a block from our quarters, I leaped from the car and slid down the street on my luggage.

Thirty years later, Powers was in Vancouver, covering his 17th Olympic Games for the
Globe,
when Nodar Kumaritashvili, a 21-year-old slider from the Republic of Georgia, heaved himself down the lethal track called the "Elevator Shaft." The ice was as treacherous as it was manicured—hosed between runs with a fine mist of water, scraped and polished and buffed to a diabolical sheen and chilled by ammonia-filled pipes that sucked heat from the concrete walls. Kumaritashvili was wearing gloves with small spikes on the fingertips for extra traction when he began his descent, the last anyone would make from the men's starting house 1,374 meters from the finish line.

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" until 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."