The Best American Sports Writing 2015
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DAN O’SULLIVAN is a freelance writer whose work has been featured by Deadspin, Salon, Gawker, American Circus, Vice Sports, and Et Tu, Mr. Destructo? This is his first appearance in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Chicago.
BRIAN PHILLIPS is a staff writer at Grantland.
TOMMY TOMLINSON is a contributing writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. This is his second appearance in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, Alix Felsing, and their old yellow Lab, Fred.
WELLS TOWER’S work has appeared in GQ, the Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s, Outside, and many other publications. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia University.
DON VAN NATTA JR. is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in January 2012 after 16 years as a New York Times correspondent based in Washington, London, Miami, and New York. Previously, he worked for eight years at the Miami Herald. A member of three Pulitzer Prize–winning teams, Van Natta is the author of First Off the Tee and the coauthor of Her Way, both New York Times bestsellers, and Wonder Girl. He lives in Miami with his wife, Lizette Alvarez, who is a Times correspondent, and their two daughters. This is his second appearance in The Best American Sports Writing.
DAN WETZEL is the national columnist for Yahoo! Sports and a New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Death to the BCS and Sole Influence. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts.
A native of Anchorage, Alaska, SETH WICKERSHAM is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine, where he has worked since graduating from the University of Missouri in 2000. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Alison Overholt, and their daughter, Maddie. One of Seth’s favorite moments in 2014 was visiting Y. A. Tittle months after the story was published. Tittle remembered him.
Notable Sports Writing of 2014
SELECTED BY GLENN STOUT
JAKE ABRAHAMSON
Second Sight. Sierra, January/February
MICAH ABRAMS
Speed Riders. Ski Magazine, October
LILI ANOLIK
It All Began with OJ. Vanity Fair, June
KEVIN ARMSTRONG
Growing Up Beckham. New York Daily News, December 1
CHRIS FELICIANO ARNOLD
Below the Beautiful Horizon. Harper’s Magazine, June 24
ROSECRANS BALDWIN
Learn to Kill in Seven Days or Less. GQ, February
KEN BENSINGER
Mister Ten Percent. BuzzFeed News, June 6
STEPHEN G. BLOOM
Three Seconds. FactionMagazine, November 9
SAM BORDEN
A Swift Luge Plunge into Frozen Sorrow. The Seattle Times, February 2
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER
Girls Fight Out. Matter, December 9
BRIAN BURNSED
Unfinished. NCAA Champion, August 18
BRIN-JONATHAN BUTLER
Héroes for Sale. SB Nation, June 10
JOHN CANZANO
16 Years After Oregon State Football Gang-Rape Allegation, Brenda Tracy Steps from the Shadows. The Oregonian, November 14
SEAN CHAFFIN
Take It Off the Board. Dallas Observer, November 6
ZAC CRAIN
Tony Dorsett Is Losing His Mind. D Magazine, February
CHUCK CULPEPPER
The Value of Struggle. Sports on Earth, April 15
ALEJANDRO DANOIS
From Humble Beginnings. The Shadow League, March 5
LANE DEGREGORY
In Pahokee, Football Serves as a Way Out. Tampa Bay Times, December 14
KATHY DOBIE
The Undefeated Champions of Defeat City. GQ, May
JASON FAGONE
Dropped. Grantland, March 18
CHRISTINE FENNESSY
Running Back from Hell. Runner’s World, March
JON FINKEL
Writer’s Love of Basketball Comes from Special Driveway Game Devised with Dad. ThePostGame, March 13
LEW FREEDMAN
United Nations of Basketball. Basketball Times, May
STEVE FRIEDMAN
Blown Together. Runner’s World, May
RYAN GOLDBERG
Secret to Success. ProPublica, May 2
AARON GORDON
Did Football Cause 20 Deaths in 1905? Deadspin, January 22
MICHAEL GRAFF
Up, and Away. Washingtonian, April
JONATHAN GREEN
The Hare and the Hunter. Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter
SEAN GREGORY AND ALEXANDER WOLFF
The Game That Saved March Madness. Time, March 13
DAVID HAGLUND
Why Isn’t Delonte West in the NBA? Slate, June 4
SPENCER HALL
The Istanbul Derby. SB Nation, April 28
GREG HANLON
The Many Crimes of Mel Hall. SB Nation, July 15
NANCY HASS
Fallon Fox: The Toughest Woman in Sports. GQ, January
ERIK HEDEGAARD
Joe Hardcore: The Spartan Race Founder Tells All. Men’s Journal, July
SEAN HOJNACKI
The Game Is to Be Sold. The Classical, July 1
GREG HOWARD
How Jon Jones Became the Baddest Motherfucker on Earth. Deadspin, December 30
PATRICK HRUBY
Can a Better Helmet Save Your Kid’s Brain? Washingtonian, December 2
ROBERT HUBER
The Last Days of Bill Conlin. Philadelphia, April 1
PAT JORDAN
An Idiot in Exile. Sports on Earth, July 24
DREW JUBERA AND PETER BOHLER
Last Chance U. GQ, November
JESSE KATZ
Safe. Los Angeles, May
ZAK KEEFER
The Ageless Adam Vinatieri. Indianapolis Star, December 28
ERIC KESTER
The End Is Not Near. Bicycling, May
NICK KOSMIDER AND BENJAMIN HOCHMAN
Everything Matters. The Denver Post, November 30–December 1
MICHAEL KRUSE
The Making of a Prodigy. Floridian, March
The Right Thing to Do vs. the State of Florida. SB Nation, August 26
THOMAS LAKE
The Other Side of a Miracle. Sports Illustrated, November 25
JACK LANG
The Beautiful Language. Roads & Kingdoms, February 20
TIM LAYDEN
Danger Zone. Sports Illustrated, September 1
JESSICA LUTHER
The Wrestler and the Rape Victim. Vice Sports, December 15
JEFF MACGREGOR
The Illustrated Man. ESPN.com, May 22
RICK MAESE
The Last Flight of Speedy Peterson. The Washington Post, January 5
ERIK MALINOWSKI
Pitchman. Fox Sports, July 17
SARAH MARSHALL
Remote Control. The Believer, January
JEFF MAYSH
Halftime Hero. Howler, Fall
The Legend of Panther Girl. Victory Journal, December
J. BRADY MCCOLLOUGH
Evgeni Malkin. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 8
BRYAN MEALER
Harvester Good. Texas Monthly, November
DOUG MILLER
Colabello Has Quite a Story to Tell. MLB.com, May 22
ED MILLER
Holding Court. The Virginian-Pilot, June 19
ERIC MOSKOWITZ
For Jared Remy, Leniency Was the Rule Until One Lethal Night. The Boston Globe, March 23
MATT NEGRIN
Silence in the Favela. SB Nation, June 4
BEN NICKOL
The River Pharaohs. Canoe & Kayak, June
MATT NORLANDER
Bond Beyond Basketball. CBS Sports, November 21
JOHN S. O’CONNOR
The Ice House. Under the Sun, July 31
WILLIAM POWELL
Eat, Pray, Shove. St. Louis, August
SCOTT RAAB
God (Still) Hates Cleveland. Esquire, September
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p; SHANN RAY
Takes Enemy. Narrative, Fall
DAN ROBSON
Home and Really Far Away. SportsNet, May 12
MICHAEL RUBINO
Larry Bird’s Greatest Shot Was the One He Didn’t Take. Indianapolis Monthly, December
REBECCA RUIZ
Soccer Broke My Brain. Aeon, March 21
ALBERT SAMAHA
Over the Volcano. The Village Voice, March 11
KELEFA SANNEH
Mean Girl. The New Yorker, July 28
GRAYSON SCHAFFER
Black Year. Outside, August
JOHN SCHEINMAN
Memories of a Master. Blood-Horse, May 12
LIZZY SCULLY
Birth, Sickness, Old Age, Death. Alpinist, March
MATTHEW SHAER
Bangkok Prison Blood Sport. Men’s Journal, April
DAVE SHEININ and KRISSAH THOMPSON
The N Word. The Washington Post, November 9
GARY SHELTON
Gary Shelton’s Hardest Word: Goodbye. Tampa Bay Times, November 14
DANIEL SHERRELL
The Big Pin. Colorado Review, Summer
ALAN SIEGEL
Sabre Rattler. Sports on Earth, January 6
ROBERT SILVERMAN
Native American Basketball Team in Wyoming Have Hoop Dreams of Their Own. The Daily Beast, August 31
BRYAN SMITH
The Long Rebound for Darrell Williams. Chicago, September
SETH STEVENSON
Grandmaster Clash. Slate, September 18
PETE THAMEL
Out of Power. Sports Illustrated, August 25
LOUISA THOMAS
Together We Make Football. Grantland, September 17
RACHEL TOOR
Learning to Pitch. SB Nation, June 13
PAUL TOUGH
A Speck in the Sea. New York Times Magazine, January 2
CHRISTINE VAN DUSEN
Foul Territory. Atlanta, August
L. JON WERTHEIM and KEN RODRIGUEZ
Young, Gifted, and Homeless. Sports Illustrated, October 20
LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE
In Cold Mud. The New Yorker, January 27
BRAD WOLVERTON
The Courting of Marvin Clark. The Journal of Higher Education, June 1
ELLIOTT D. WOODS
A Death at Touch Mudder. Outside, January
SUSAN ZALKIND
The Murders Before the Marathon. Boston, March
Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in The Best American Series®.
About the Editors
WRIGHT THOMPSON, guest editor, started his sports writing career as a student at the University of Missouri, where he covered sports for the Columbia Missourian. He interned at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and worked as the LSU beat writer. He then moved to the Kansas City Star, where he covered a wide variety of sports. In 2006 he joined ESPN.com and ESPN: The Magazine as a senior writer. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
GLENN STOUT, the series editor of The Best American Sports Writing since its inception, is the author of Young Woman and the Sea and Fenway 1912. He serves as the long-form editor of SB Nation and lives in Alburgh, Vermont.
Footnotes
1. Name has been changed.
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2. T-Locc: “You take a whole kilo and chop it up into rocks and sell it on the block, and make 2K off of each ounce and there were 36 ounces in each one. That was serious money, and you selling that in a day.”
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3. On May 18, 2009, an unarmed Dolla was shot in the back and shoulder in broad daylight in the ritzy Beverly Center parking lot in L.A. by a man he’d had a scuffle with a few days earlier in Atlanta. The perpetrator was found not guilty by reason of self-defense.
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4. It’s sometimes mistakenly assumed there is one large-scale war between Crips (blue) and Bloods (red), but often the most violent rivalries are between various subsets or “cards,” within the same overarching alliance to Crip or Blood. The Playboys and Mansfields are both West L.A. gangs from the same Crip subset—“Trays” (others include “Neighborhood Crip,” “Deuces,” and “Blocc Crips”)—and have lived in harmony for years. K-Swiss and Flaco likely knew their intended target well.
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1. Japanese mythology, like many aspects of early Japanese culture, was heavily influenced by China.
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2. There are two additional yokozuna who supposedly practiced before 1749, but it’s only with the ascension that year of Maruyama Gondazaemon, the third holder of the title, that we reach a point where we can be pretty sure about names and dates and whether people actually existed outside folklore, etc.
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3. Sample lyrics: “Built to last, like an Energizer bunny/Pushin’ 700, and still makin’ money.”
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4. After chasing him into the street and into a taxi, allegedly.
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5. The extent of Japan’s suicide problem is sometimes overstated by the media, but Japan may be unique in the way that suicide has been historically celebrated and seen as an honorable rather than a shameful act.
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6. E.g., the concept of mono no aware, which translates into something like “a pleasing sadness at the transience of beautiful things.” The literary scholar Motoori Norinaga coined this idea in the mid-18th century to describe The Tale of Genji, the great Heian-period novel whose author—perhaps deliberately—left it unfinished. When the protagonist dies late in the book, his death is never mentioned directly; instead, it’s marked by a blank chapter called “Vanished into the Clouds.”
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7. There had been no public instances of seppuku in Japan since the war era; incredulous editors concluded that their writers were getting the story wrong. One newspaper’s late-afternoon edition ran with the headline “Injured Mishima Rushed to Hospital.”
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8. Koga, too, was prepared to commit seppuku—all the young men were—but shortly before the coup attempt, Mishima ordered them to live, charging them to explain his actions to the world.
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9. The advice of the Yokozuna Deliberation Council carries immense weight, but the Japan Sumo Association has final say in all promotions.
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10. Although in fairness, Japanese rikishi have been involved in their share of controversy; of Hakuho’s first five opponents, two were among the more than a dozen wrestlers suspended in 2010 for illegally betting on baseball.
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11. In the four tournaments since his losing effort in January, Kisenosato has gone 9-6, 13-2, 9-6, and 9-6. He has yet to win a championship and has not been promoted to yokozuna.
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12. The 20th-century Western idea of the samurai as an armored warrior, a kind of Japanese knight, is not particularly accurate. Some samurai were warriors, and samurai were licensed to carry swords. But by the 19th century the samurai class had evolved into a kind of hereditary government bureaucracy. Many were officials whose roles had nothing to do with war.
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13. In the Osaka tournament two months later, Kakuryu beat Hakuho, won the championship, and earned a promotion to yokozuna. Hakuho being Hakuho, however, he won the next three tournaments, including last month’s fall basho in Tokyo. He now has 31 championships, one short of the record.
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n Archive.