The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Seth Wickersham, Awakening the Giant

  Chris Jones, One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight Pounds of Sons

  Joel Anderson, The Two Michael Sams

  Jeremy Collins, Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux

  Elizabeth Merrill, Being Tommy Morrison’s Son

  Dan O’Sullivan, Money in the Bank

  Rick Bass, The Rage of the Squat King

  Chris Ballard, Haverford Hoops

  Tommy Tomlinson, Precious Memories

  Don Van Natta Jr., Jerry Football

  Tim Graham, Broke and Broken

  Greg Hanlon, Sins of the Preacher

  Flinder Boyd, Run and Gun

  Katie Baker, Those Kansas City Blues: A Family History

  Brian Phillips, The Sea of Crises

  Burkhard Bilger, In Deep

  Wells Tower, Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?

  Ariel Levy, Breaking the Waves

  Christopher Beam, The Year of the Pigskin

  Scott Eden, No One Walks Off the Island

  Dan Wetzel, Peyton Manning Leaves Crushing Super Bowl Loss with Reputation Intact

  Contributors’ Notes

  Notable Sports Writing of 2014

  Read More from The Best American Series®

  About the Editors

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Wright Thompson

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The Best American Series® is a registered trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. The Best American Sports Writing™ is a trademark of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the copyright owner unless such copying is expressly permitted by federal copyright law. With the exception of nonprofit transcription in Braille, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is not authorized to grant permission for further uses of copyrighted selections reprinted in this book without the permission of their owners. Permission must be obtained from the individual copyright owners identified herein. Address requests for permission to make copies of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt material to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  ISSN 1056-8034

  ISBN 978-0-544-34005-3

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Cover photograph © Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-544-46267-0

  v1.1015

  “The Two Michael Sams” by Joel Anderson. First published on Buzzfeed.com, November 12, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

  “Those Kansas City Blues: A Family History” by Katie Baker. First published on TheDailyBeast.com, October 24, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by the Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the copyright laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

  “Haverford Hoops” by Chris Ballard. First published on SI.com. Copyright © 2014 by Sports Illustrated. Reprinted by permission of Sports Illustrated.

  “The Rage of the Squat King” by Rick Bass. First published in New Nowhere, vol. 1. Copyright © 2014 by Rick Bass. Reprinted by permission of Rick Bass.

  “The Year of the Pigskin” by Christopher Beam. First published in the New Republic, April 21, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Beam. Reprinted by permission of Christopher Beam.

  “In Deep” by Burkhard Bilger. First published in The New Yorker, April 21, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Burkhard Bilger. Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker.

  “Run and Gun” by Flinder Boyd. First published on FoxSports.com, June 30, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Flinder Boyd. Reprinted by permission of Flinder Boyd.

  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux” by Jeremy Collins. First published on SBNation.com. Copyright © 2014 by Jeremy Collins. Reprinted by permission of Jeremy Collins.

  “No One Walks Off the Island” by Scott Eden. First published on ESPN.com, April 17, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  Excerpts from “Stroke of Madness” by Scott Eden. First published in ESPN The Magazine, February 2013. Copyright © 2013 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  “Broke and Broken” by Tim Graham. First published in the Buffalo News, November 27, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by the Buffalo News. Reprinted by permission.

  “Sins of the Preacher” by Greg Hanlon. First published on SportsOnEarth.com, April 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Sports on Earth. Reprinted by permission of Sports on Earth/MLB Advanced Media.

  “One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight Pounds of Sons” by Chris Jones. First published in Esquire, June/July 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Chris Jones. Reprinted by permission of Chris Jones.

  “Breaking the Waves” by Ariel Levy. First published in The New Yorker, February 10, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Ariel Levy. Reprinted by permission of Ariel Levy.

  “Being Tommy Morrison’s Son” by Elizabeth Merrill. First published on ESPN.com. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  “Money in the Bank” by Dan O’Sullivan. First published in Jacobin magazine, April 11, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Jacobin Foundation, Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

  “The Sea of Crises” by Brian Phillips. First published on Grantland.com. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  “Precious Memories” by Tommy Tomlinson. First published in ESPN The Magazine, March 5, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” by Wells Tower. First published in GQ, June 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Wells Tower. Reprinted by permission of Wells Tower.

  “Jerry Football” by Don Van Natta Jr. First published in ESPN The Magazine, August 28, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  “Peyton Manning Leaves Crushing Super Bowl Loss with Reputation Intact” by Dan Wetzel. First published on Yahoo.com, February 3, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by Dan Wetzel/Yahoo Sports. Reprinted by permission of Yahoo Sports.

  “Awakening the Giant” by Seth Wickersham. First published in ESPN The Magazine, July 15, 2014. Copyright © 2014 by ESPN, Inc. Reprinted by permission of ESPN.

  Foreword

  I WAS A SICK KID.

  I was born with an enlarged heart, had virtually every childhood disease by the age of two, and thereafter was never well for long. My mother complained that at birth I didn’t cry, I coughed, and she lost track of the number of times she put me on the school bus healthy, only to get a call an hour or so later that I had a fever of 103 or 104 and that she had to come get me immediately. Throw in an eye operation, a bone disease, unexplained searing headaches, five or six bouts with pneumonia, poking and probing by specialists, and all sorts of other unexplained afflictions and accidents—falling on a stick and having it pierce the roof of my mouth, crashing through a glass door, a coma after a tetanus shot, having my front teeth knocked out in a car accident, a broken arm, a torn rotator cuff, a crushed bladder, a half-dozen concussions, mysterious hives caused by cold water, chronic bronchitis, mononucleosis
, and so on—well, I missed a lot of school. At the end of the year, when other kids bragged about their grades, I boasted about how many days I missed. I once set a personal record just shy of 50, and always, always missed at least 20.

  It made for a strange life. I think I fell partway into myself at an early age and have never climbed completely out. I was ruled by my imagination, the only constant, escaping the hospital or sickbed by embracing the fever dreams and fantasies and shadow plays on the wall of my room as I’d be woken up to take a breathing treatment or eat ice chips or take a pill or have my temperature taken, a humidifier spitting in the background and mentholated oil percolating through quadruple layers of clothes.

  Confined, too much, and cut off from anything much beyond the bedridden, mind-stripping wasteland of daytime TV, I was saved by words, the pages of paper I lowered over the bedrails to escape to another place. I didn’t just read words, I consumed them and allowed them to lead me away, never questioning their value, having utter faith in whatever place they took me. I didn’t learn to read books as much as occupy them, to wiggle into the crevices of language and characters and stories and then be swept away, or carried elsewhere. Those places often seemed more real to me than where I was, buried under quilts, and even today my dreams are not often of where I am but ongoing chapters of stories and scenes that unfold without end. I am not in my dreams as much as they are in me.

  At a certain point, as I grew older, I began to realize that some of those words that captured me were more potent than others, the connections stronger, more immediate and emotional, making me feel in ways nothing else ever did. That words could do that seemed like some kind of magic, an utter mystery of invention.

  How was it possible? How could writers do that? How could someone, with words alone, ink on paper, make me feel so much, so deeply? How could words teach what life had not, and articulate thoughts and feelings that I’d never before expressed but that now, once articulated, were unquestionably mine? How did they get in there? And then eventually came a question even more important for me to ask: how can I do that?

  Unconscious of its near-impossibility, I followed the usual path of a young writer, one both completely common and entirely my own: voracious reading, writing for the school newspaper, and then off to college for creative writing, coupled with a headlong search for experience—sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll but also pouring concrete, driving cross-country, working one crap job after another, trying to get old fast, to get past the awkwardness of the young writer to become just the noun itself. I was aware enough to know that I had to jettison and write out all the bad sentences and pretentious ideas and rules-ridden construction and then, every once in a great while, I could see—actually hear it spoken from my own mouth when reading my own words—something I unquestionably wrote that worked. Then of course came the challenge: figuring out why and how to make it happen again, to do it more or less, if not on command, at least often enough to know it was no accident.

  Twenty-five years ago, I was somewhere on that path, at the start, making the transition from young writer to writer, when stewardship of this book improbably came to me. I’ve told the story before—I had an agent who was asked to recommend another agent who might have a client to edit a proposed new annual sports writing anthology. Purely by luck, she recommended me. At the time I was writing sports features for Boston magazine, freelancing, working at the Boston Public Library, and trying to both write and work full-time. From the start, I could envision an entire shelf of editions of this book, my name sharing the spines, some small part of me realizing I was meant to do this.

  What I did not anticipate was what was really important. Selecting material for this book forced me, for the first time really, to take the why and how of writing seriously. I wasn’t just fooling around anymore. Knowing what worked and what did not now mattered. My take on what was good or bad would be tested every single year, not just by the readers of this book but by my peers, other writers, all of whom, I was certain, were far smarter and more qualified than I.

  To paraphrase the poet James Wright, fear is what quickened me. I believed from the start that even though the subject matter of this book would be “just sports,” sports reach into so much of the world that the subject can include the full dimension of our experience; the writers would prove that, and all I had to do was uncover the evidence. The fear came from worrying, not that the work did not exist, but that I would not find it, or recognize it, that I would miss the essential and end up collecting the arbitrary. I feared that the subject would be seen as “just sports”—nothing more than an accounting of who recently won or lost.

  The writers, of course, saved me. They did so not only with their words but with their competitiveness, the kind that makes us both share discoveries with others and curse ourselves for not writing it first, or doing it better. In this way the best writing forced its way into this book, and with each passing year I began to have a better idea not only of what writing works, but why.

  A big part of that was due to the first decision made in regard to this series, and perhaps the most important one. When it was still in the talking stages, I suggested that we call it The Best American Sports Writing—two words, rather than the compound “sportswriting.” From the start, I think, this term made the book larger, more inclusive. It wasn’t “just sports.” It was “just writing,” and the influence of the adjective “sports” became not absolute and narrow but expansive, wide, and ever-searching.

  I recently had a writer ask me how to find stories “that have that larger, human, beyond-sports resonance.” I think the answer is in that first decision. Sportswriting tells you the score, the essentials, who won and who lost and why. The work represented in this book tells you everything else—why you care.

  Unburdened by an exclusive definition, the series was able to evolve in ever more interesting directions. While there has always been room here for “sportswriting”—the columns, game stories, and shorter features of the daily press—over the past 25 years the media landscape has changed dramatically and profoundly. The daily press, rather than being essential and central to the genre, now shares that place not only with other print products but with digital media and an increasing number of online outlets.

  Over these years, as the medium changed, so did the content. New formats freed writing from constraints of both time and space. Reporting and reaction need not wait, nor must they fit a predetermined hole. Over time the possibilities of what writers can do have expanded. And ever so slowly, after a transitional period of massive contraction in the print world, the outlets for such work have expanded as well.

  This series has bridged perhaps the most volatile era in journalism. When I published my first magazine story in 1986 (also my first written story, period), I wrote it out longhand and then had to borrow an electric typewriter. The first edition of this book, published in 1991 and edited by David Halberstam (whose immense generosity I will never forget), included only print stories, nearly half of them from newspapers and newspaper magazines. Online journalism did not exist. Not until the 2000 edition did the book feature a story from an online source. (For the record, it was Pat Toomay’s “Clotheslined” from Sportsjones.com.) The online behemoth of ESPN did not crack the pages until 2002 (Gene Wojciechowski’s “Last Call” from ESPN.com).

  This evolution has been a good thing. When I was that sick kid, most magazines were out of reach—our family budget did not allow for Sports Illustrated, much less The New Yorker, and I had access to only a single newspaper, the boosterish Columbus Dispatch. Sports writing from elsewhere lived on a single shelf at the local library, 796.M365 in the old Dewey decimal system, where the old Best Sports Stories series lived.

  Now, of course, almost everything is available: most print sources also appear somewhere online, and the online world has proliferated and grown in the past few years at an astonishing rate. As a result, the nature of sports writing has inevitably changed, evolving in ways th
at were impossible to predict even a decade ago. But it has always been this way.

  Sportswriting (the compound word) initially took shape as the score and the game report; it was soon supplemented by the notes columns, which gave birth to the true columnist. Features—at least the kind of work we recognize today as features—were exceedingly rare before the 1920s (the start of the age of the magazine) and really did not proliferate until after World War II. And there it sat for some time, sportswriting encompassed in but four forms: notes, columns, gamers, and features.

  By the 1960s, the influence of writers like Gay Talese and the need to provide something the lumbering presence of television could not were changing the nature and character of sports features: they were becoming harder, more demanding and ambitious. When the stray issue of Sport or SI found its way into my hands, or into the old Best Sports Stories, I was mesmerized. Over the next day or two, I was not confined to bed but freed.

  Over the next few decades this kind of work began to flourish, not just in Sports Illustrated and Sport but also in the daily press (as what became known as take-outs), newspaper Sunday supplements, magazines, and the late lamented Inside Sports, and the hybrid National Sports Daily. Eventually sports-themed features and profiles became ever more regular staples not just in men’s magazines, like GQ, Esquire, and Playboy, but also in regional and general-interest magazines and even in more literary publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. When this series launched, these were the places where sports writing lived and flourished.

  Change, of course, is inevitable. As the online world began to develop, the print world, through a combination of pure demographics, greed, and one misstep after another, began to shrink—as did, for a time, the amount and kind of writing the guest editors tend to select for this book. With fewer pages available in print sources, fewer stories were published, and those that did appear were often shorter and less ambitious. The Sunday supplement magazine all but died off (there were nearly 100 when this series started), and the 3,000-, 4,000-, or 5,000-word take-outs or serial features became both more rare and more predictable.