The Best American Sports Writing 1991
Halberstam, David
THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING 1991 Edited by David Halberstam (Series Editor: Glenn Stout) Houghton Mifflin/338 pages/$21.95; $9.95 paper reviewed by SHAWN MILLER B ack in the days when his...
...Stout has changed the emphasis to writing...
...But give a sportswriter more than one hectic, coffee stained night to crank out a piece, and he'll ruin it through son* creative wizardry...
...Mary Albert provides the "word by word" action for National Public Radio, with color commentary and expert analysis from Joyce Carol Oates...
...he holds the magazine up triumphantly...
...By endorsing Parker Pens, Smith-Corona, Liquid Paper, and Hills Bros...
...Alighieri...
...Albert's interviews with Jackson mix the hilarious with the sublime: "Bo on Poe: 'Edgar couldn't pass the drug testing we have today.' " Racine has a field day pummeling the sports media hypesters...
...In "On the Bunny Trail," by Jack Smith of Philadelphia Magazine, the "sport" under scrutiny is beagling, the object of which is to follow (on foot) a pack of killer beagles as they chase (but don't necessarily catch) rabbits...
...You ought to hear those tapes...
...third baseman Kevin Rochefort asks, peering over Matt's shoulder as Matt leafs past the week's celebs, barely giving them a look...
...after Bo ends the exhibition with the egalitarian "We are all Bo," Oates drops the ultimate broadcast cliché: "He really came to write today...
...Like those tapes, the best sports writing—from Halberstam's The Summer of '49 to Jim Bouton's Ball Four to Peter Golenbock and Sparky Lyle's Bronx Zoo—gives the reader a rare look into an otherwise closed world...
...The American Spectator January 1992 75 While the thought of Hemingway wrestling for hours with a flashing marlin holds some manly appeal, fishing mostly comes down to guzzling Milwaukee's Best and getting the line tangled...
...The breast-examination ad," Matt explains...
...You can't see everything, but you can see quite a lot...
...And Little League baseball—without agents, billion-dollar television contracts, or chartered jets—is covered with land mines of truisms about the "real meaning of baseball...
...Every time Bo takes one deep, or plows into an end zone, the cash register will start ringing...
...once" and "years ago" are as specific as he gets) when writers were given several weeks to produce a story...
...Baseball is easily the most poeticized of sports, a tendency that worshipful commissioners like the late Bart Giamatti have done nothing to discourage...
...In the face of an idealistic, if effective, coach and a Hoosiers-like run at the Little League World Series, King manages to skirt the stereotypes at every opportunity: On the trip back to Machias the next day, Matt Kinney reveals one of the chief attractions People magazine holds for boys of Little League age...
...Since, in their spawning frenzy, the salmon do not rank eating high on their list of priorities, the only way to catch them is to "snag" them: you toss a strong line with a heavy hook into the river, let it settle, give a blind jerk, and hope to snag a fish...
...Unfortunately, Racine's piece could serve to parody many of the other works in the Stout-Halberstam collection...
...During preparation for an interview, a "60 Minutes" technician bragged to the Yankee boss of the show's wireless transmitters: "You'll forget you have them on...
...The twenty-four pieces that make up The Best American Sports Writing 1991 mark a departure from the long-running Best Sports Stories series, which bit the proverbial dust in 1982, after thirty-eight years of publication...
...C:1 76 The American Spectator January 1992...
...Stout himself sets a bad example in the foreword, where he throws this wild pitch: "As long as human beings have played games and as long as human beings have been able to scratch out a written language, some of those scratches have been about those games...
...Fishing, another questionable athletic activity, also gets the Stout treatment...
...What are you looking for...
...I'm sure there's one here someplace," he says, leafing slowly through an issue he had found in the back seat...
...the 1982 edition tells of Dave Win-field's shocking $20 million contract, Dwight Clark's twisting touchdown catch against the Cowboys, and Isiah Thomas's escape from the clutches of the evil Bobby Knight...
...Paul Pekin, the author of "A Fling and a Prayer" for the Chicago Reader, journeys to the Sable River of northern Michigan to "snag" the chi-nook salmon...
...The oh-so-precious Roger" Angell, in his annual guided tour through the year in baseball, reports a "friend" telling him "that [Oakland manager Tony] La Russa's folded arms and funereal phiz in the dugout reminded him of Dante contemplating the circles of Hell...
...In a bit of journalistic lechery that would have cheered Thompson's gonzo sensibilities, the revered Roger Kahn retails a story on George Steinbrenner for Sport Magazine, circa 1981...
...Like most wildly popular novelists, King has been looked down upon bythe literati for his assembly-line horror fiction (National Lampoon elegantly characterized the typical King outline: "Plot, plot, BOO!, plot, plot, [sex], BOO!, plot, BOO...
...William Nack of Sports Illustrated soils an otherwise beautiful ode to Secretariat by describing the famous thoroughbred as being "twelve in front and steam puffing from his nostrils as from a factory whistle, bounding like some mythical beast out of Greek lore," and recalling Secretariat's victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes as a moment when "I yielded a part of myself to that horse forever...
...Those colShawn Miller is The American Spectator's editorial intern...
...Indeed, one wonders what beverage Thompson was enjoying when he wrote of the Miami Dolphins, after their victory in the 1972 Super Bowl: "They could almost taste it...
...Glenn Stout, with a little help from Pulitzer Prize–winner David Halberstam, has taken it upon himself to put to rest the notion of sportswriter as rogue journalist once and for all...
...What...
...There almost always is...
...That is jealousy talking...
...Coffee (a big deal with Apple is in the works), Bo "is great for fiction," according to Oates...
...Racine's setting is a fictitious Madison Square Garden, in which sixteen thousand fans constitute "the smallest crowd Bo has performed in front of since a late August doubleheader in Cleveland...
...B ut Bo is not the biggest star in The Best American Sports Writing 1991...
...You go traipsing across other people's property knocking down their fences, and the dogs rip your chickens apart and attack your pets...
...a curious fan reading this book in 2041 will find no record of Michael Jordan's teary heroics in the NBA finals or Scott Norwood's dry-eyed Super Bowl failure...
...Head Down" is a fortunate closing piece, clearing from the reader's mind visions of belligerent beagles, psychotic salmon, and the glaring Mr...
...A non-beagler complains, "What a dreadful sport...
...This approach results in a broad definition of what constitutes a sport, one that goes far beyond the oft-debated borders usually set around bowling and golf...
...A sports journalist in Florida at the beginning of his career, Thompson puts the sportswriter in his traditional place: not skilled enough to cover topics of importance, yet competent enough to describe men playing boys' games and lucky enough to get pie-eyed with those men when the games are over...
...Unfortunately, the beagles seem hard-pressed to stay with the program...
...With friends like that . .. By contrast, David Racine's "Bo KnowsFiction," from the New Yorker, which concentrates its attention on poking fun at the media circus that follows the oft-injured commercial actor, is delightfully lighthearted...
...He prefers the piscatorial equivalent of beagling: snagging...
...That honor goes to the writer who will probably have 100 million books in print worldwide by the turn of the millennium: Stephen King, who contributes "Head Down," a reconstruction of the Bangor (Maine) West Little League team's improbable run through the Eastern Regional Tournament...
...The smell was stronger than a ton of rotten mangoes...
...Arrest that man...
...The salmon, trapped on the sides by narrow banks and in the front by an impending dam, are in effect being shot in a barrel...
...But Stout is not interested in the normal—let alone noble—aspects of angling...
...The point of beagling is not so much for the dogs to massacre hares as for the humans to "get in touch with nature" by looking at wood doves and giant blue herons...
...ile the Best Sports Stories series relied heavily on newspaper staff journalists, like Leigh Montville of the Boston Globe and Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times, who faced deadlines and space limits, Stout yearns for the good old days (what days...
...King's great knack is that of presenting realistic characters in extreme situations, a talent that resonates throughout this story...
...lections pinpointed the top stories of the year...
...Perhaps Pekin captures the essence of this activity when he admits that the only sport involved comes in struggling to gain a place on the banks of the Sable, and then dodging the deadly hooks that fill the air in the subsequent casting flurry...
...Jackson sits in the center of the arena, staring down a Smith-Corona electric, about to embark on his third "hobby": writing...
...Their nerves burned like open sores on a dog's neck...
...Too often, The Best American Sports Writing 1991 sacrifices substance for style, and style won't get you behind clubhouse doors...
...We've even used them with First Ladies, and four of them . . . actually wore the transmitters to the bathroom...
...9.95 paper reviewed by SHAWN MILLER B ack in the days when his heart was full of fear and loathing, Hunter S. Thompson called sportswriters "a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them to cover...
...Here it is...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
