The Best American Sports Writing 2001 (The Best American Series) [Paperback]

Glenn Stout (Editor), Bud Collins (Consultant Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2001

For almost fifty years, Bud Collins has ranked as one of America’s premier sports journalists, best known for his tennis commentary on NBC and his sports column in the Boston Globe. From surfing to golf, baseball to bodybuilding, Collins’s selections for this tenth anniversary edition celebrate sports of all stripes, in pieces by H. G. Bissinger, Charles P. Pierce, Jim Harrison, Rick Reilly, and others.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Best American Sports Writing 2001 presents a wide-ranging survey of notable writing that extends well beyond traditional stick and ball sports. Editor Bud Collins has deftly chosen articles that represent the spectrum of adventurous and competitive activities we define as sports. From football to fishing, surfing to soccer, nearly all of America's favorite pastimes and leisure activities are represented.

While this collection includes profiles of sports celebrities, such as Tiger Woods, Cal Ripken Jr., and Dale Earnhardt Jr., what makes the book noteworthy are the profiles of lesser-known athletes: Garrett Burnett, a hockey "enforcer"; George Freeth, a pioneer surfer; or Louis Zamperini, a star high school miler whose true tests arose during World War II. With the popular sports represented early on, the choices extend in both subject matter and style: racial profiling in New Jersey and the shattered dreams of hopeful basketball players; mountain climbers in Kyrgyzstan taken hostage; the sociology of losing; rediscovering joy in fishing; why a sportswriter hangs it up; a soccer mom's thoughts on her child's first goal.

As Collins notes in the foreword, "As I read these stories each year, I find myself caring about someone, something, or some sport I know little about and couldn't have imagined ever wanting to know more about." Whether it's a profile of a horsewoman with a seemingly dual existence, or a piece describing what it's like to dive for loot on a sunken liner 200 feet down in a nasty stretch of water, The Best American Sports Writing 2001 offers superb tales of humankind's drive to win, conquer, or at least survive. --Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly

Living up to its series' reputation for quality is this 10th-anniversary collection of 27 features and profiles culled from a variety of publications that goes well beyond America's sports pages. Collins, who is best known for his tennis commentary on NBC, certainly doesn't limit himself to his area of expertise, drawing on a wide variety of topics that ranges from the legends of baseball to the World Series of poker. Some pieces, like Buzz Bissinger's chronicle of Joe DiMaggio's last days, are notable for the sheer scope of their reporting, while many others, such as Bucky McMahon's dreamy account of a deep-sea dive, have a distinctly literary feel. Then there are those rare profiles, like Stephen Rodrick's essay on former heavyweight world champion Riddick Bowe or Tour‚'s article on NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., where the magic simply lies in how completely the subject is willing to open up to the writer. Readers will surely gravitate to pieces about the sports they are most interested in, but all the selections are equal in quality. And though Gene Collier, in his brief essay "The Ex-Sportswriter," attests to his notion that all sports are "highly inconsequential," the same cannot justly be said of the writing they have inspired here.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618086269
• ISBN-13: 978-0618086269
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #467,344 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Ever?, December 5, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Best American Sports Writing 2001 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

As a longtime reader of this consistently satisfying series, this years' edition just might be the best one yet. It is meatier than the last few years and each story in the book seems a little bit better than the last one. As always, there are surprises, too, not only of more obscure sports (wreck diving, poker and surfing) but in point of view, re: Gene Collier's farewell to sportswriting and Charles Young's meditation on losing. But there's plenty of straight sports, too; Tiger Woods, DiMaggio, Ripken, etc., and big names like Reilly, Pierce and Bissinger. And maybe it's me, but there's an odd, antidotal prescience to this book in these strange times. Collier's story alerts us to the real heroes, and if you need an uplift, read the story called "Toughest Miler Ever," for a true profile in courage. Collins introduction is vintage, and well, that's it. I don't want to spoil it for you, but I enjoyed this so much I rather wish I had another to read right away.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Year to Remember, June 7, 2010

By 

Dick Stull "Existential Professor" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Sports Writing 2001 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

B. Collins, ed. Best Sports Writing 2001. The Best American Series.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Xv + 368 pp.
Forward, introduction, biographical notes, notable sports writing of 2000.
$13.00 (paper), ISBN 0-618-08626-9; $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-618-08625-0.

Reviewed by Richard Arlin (Dick) Stull, Humboldt State University

In a year whose context will be shaped by the events of September 11, many of the stories in Best Sports Writing 2001 seem, in retrospect, to speak in mysterious ways. Gene Collier, for example, describes his departure from sports writing in the Ex-Sportswriter as he comes to the realization that he was looking for heroes in all the wrong places. He might have been prescient here. The anthology was printed before the terrorist Trade Center tragedy of September 11, after which we were reminded who the real heroes were: they were firemen, policemen, our armed forces, public servants, and citizens. They were us. Given the tremendous homage, respect and support given by
professional athletes to those who died or who risked their lives in the wake of the September 11 tragedy, it was clear that the athletes, too, understood who the real heroes were. A great lesson in context to be sure, and one that makes so many of the twenty-seven stories in Bud Collins' selections all the more compelling reading because these stories tell us not just about sport, but about ourselves.
A favorite story of mine was Pumping Irony. Author Robert Draper visits 60's blonde body building demigod David Draper (no relation), who is now in his fifties and making a comeback. Like millions of other skinny junior high adolescents, I remember the blonde Adonis magnificently posed on the southern California strand surrounded by
adoring starlets. I sent in for the six-week Joe Wieder body-building course that featured Dave. I did my pull-ups religiously on a broom placed between two chairs. After each workout, I flexed in the mirror, that I might one day look like Dave. The real story of Dave Draper is bittersweet and yet redemptive, as the author reveals the chasm between image and reality. And yet the truth in Dave Draper's case makes all of those who aspired to be like Dave closer to him, and him to us, in ways that have nothing to do with body-building.
Doug Most's chilling piece Shot Through the Heart gives insight into contemporary American social realities. Four promising young men from NYC are driving to North Carolina for basketball tryouts and are shot by New Jersey troopers. It is a story of prejudice, loss of innocence and dreams, and the horrors of racial profiling.
Notable sports personalities Tiger Woods, tennis player Alexandra Stevenson, and Bill Mazeroski are the subjects of fine essays. There is also a kinetic piece on Dale Earnhart Jr., the NASCAR rock and roller. The piece was written before his legendary racing dad, Dale Sr., perished in a crash.
Michael Leahy's Swing Shift is a brilliant analysis of future baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, whose natural athletic gifts and extreme competitive fires are often played down in favor of the working class, nice-guy image. But the gap between public perception and reality in Cal's case is not nearly so wide when contrasted (next page)
to Buzz Bissinger's piece on an aging Joe DiMaggio. Bissinger juxtaposes Joltin' Joe's public persona and unparalleled athletic grace with a disturbing picture of an aging icon as a jaded, stingy narcissist.
There are also touches of the bizarre. We read about the missteps and misfortunes of boxer Riddick Bowe, about a man who took hostages at the Augusta National Golf Club in 1983 and demanded to speak with President Reagan in Dave Kindred's Gate Crasher, and we follow the follies of a well-traveled hockey goon. The most bizarre story, however, is Geoffry Douglas' The Double Life of Laura Shaw. Like a character in a Ruth Rendell mystery, Laura Shaw leads the ordinary life of a low level insurance clerk but somehow becomes part of the moneyed horse crowd in Kentucky.
There are two midlife reflections: one about the first deer kill of an environmentalist/writer/city dweller and the second a meditation on fishing as a constant during the ups and downs of an author's life.
Bucky McMahon combines adventure and the surreal in a story about deep sea
divers who brave nitrogen narcosis at depths of 200 feet troving for treasures on the Andrea Doria. And for the uninitiated or those who didn't read Tom Wolfe's Man in Full, you can read Kevin Conley's hit-clip version of the coital mechanics of a horse named Storm Cat in A Stud's Life.
Woody Woodburn chronicles Los Angelino and high school track sensation Louis Zamperini, who goes the distance with a sadistic torturer named "The Bird" in a Japanese POW camp in WWII. James McManuss is an updated "Cincinatti Kid" in Fortune's Smile. McMannuss takes on a covey of cunning card-sharps at the no-limit hold'em World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Other selections include a hoop dream saga, a story of Prime Time Deion Sanders becoming a "fisher of men," and Ian Whitcomb recalls how Jack London witnessed a Christ figure "creaming" the waves at Waikiki Beach back in 1907 in a wonderful piece of American cultural history about the founder of surf-riding. There are two laments on losing. In one, author Charles Young tries to redefine, rationalize and reframe this most hated term. However, there's no ambiguity or sophistry that can salvage the reality experienced by American wrestler Sammie Hensen in Vahe Gregorian's Olympic Dream Ends in Agony.
Finally, there is a piece by Rick Reilly on a gay high school football player, and another by suburban soccer mom Beth Kephart as she chronicles the agonies and ecstasies of watching her ten-year-old son compete.
The most riveting and unusual reading of all twenty-seven selections, however, is Greg Child's Fear of Falling. Published before September 11 in Outside Magazine, Child recounts the terrifying story of four young American extreme mountain climbers who are taken hostage by Islamic militants in the forbidding peaks of Kyrgystan. After four days of forced marching and captivity, one of the climbers has to make the ultimate nightmare decision. This is a mesmerizing story of two cultures colliding - an eerily prophetic microcosm of the coming conflict in the mountains of Afghanistan that now dominates the headlines. That reprint alone is worth the price of the book.