The Best American Sports Writing 2004 (The Best American Series) [Paperback]

Glenn Stout (Editor), Richard Ben Cramer (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2004

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.

“Cracker-jack writing from some of the country’s best-known sports journalists.” — Publishers Weekly

With Richard Ben Cramer at the helm, this year’s selections embrace the world of sports in all its drama, humanity, and excitement, from swimming the Arctic Ocean to high school football. Today’s foremost journalists shed light on Mia Hamm, Amare Stoudemire, and on sports’ underbelly as a professional baseball team scalps its own tickets and as women single-mindedly pursue million-dollar athletes. We witness the World Taxidermy Championships, the final days of the Michael Jordan Wizards, and much more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This entertaining 14th installment in the annual series is as varied as its predecessors: the usual suspects (baseball, football, basketball) share space with less popular pursuits (fishing, running, bicycling) and downright peculiar ones (taxidermy). Yet most of the pieces share a particular focus. As in past editions, the editors look beyond actual sport—the games, the scores, the strategies—and instead home in on the personalities: athletes and their families, fans, coaches and, in one memorable column, groupies. "It makes good sense to me that how a person is—the conditions of his or her larger life—explains, or at least illuminates, how that person plays and competes," says Cramer (How Israel Lost; Joe DiMaggio; etc.) in his introduction. Standout entries include Steve Friedman's masterful "The Race of Truth," about an obsessive Scot's pursuit of cycling's little-known grail, the Hour Record; Michael Leahy's refreshingly honest portrait of Michael Jordan's last days with the Wizards; and three frank, gripping and completely distinct accounts of athletes (two of whom are lesser-known) and their families: Paul Solotaroff's "Growing Up Mantle," Peter De Jonge's "The Leap of His Life" and Rick Telander's "Playing Against the Clock." Though some of the shorter columns suffer in comparison to the weightier magazine pieces, this edition is reliably compelling and surprisingly addictive, much like sport itself.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This series, which began in 1991, continues to provide insight into the art of sports writing. In this installment, editor Cramer, the author of Joe DiMaggio (2000), selects pieces from such publications as Sports Illustrated, Texas Monthly, GQ, and Men's Journal as well as numerous major newspapers. Among the most recognizable authors are Mitch Albom, Ira Berkow, and Bob Ryan. The subject matter is as diverse as the sources. There are profiles of soccer star Mia Hamm and Chinese basketball icon Yao Ming; insightful commentary on Michael Jordan's tumultuous last days as a player with the Washington Wizards; and a fascinating report on six-man high-school football in the rural Texas town of Penelope. Among the most memorable selections is Rick Telander's poignant comparison of his own athletic career to those of his children and Gary Smith's very sensitive profile of Hamm, in which we come to understand that fame is no barrier to heartbreak. An ongoing centerpiece for all sports collections. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First edition & printing edition (October 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618251391
• ISBN-13: 978-0618251391
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,113,714 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good and diverse selection of sports writing, April 12, 2005

By 

Steven Hellerstedt "SH" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best American Sports Writing 2004 (The Best American Series) (Paperback)

You don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy The Best American Sport Writing 2004. I don't have a lot of interest in, much less passion for, running. Bicycling and swimming, too, seem sensible and healthy activities, but not all that compelling. It stands against reason, then, that the stories I liked the most in this book had to do with running, bicycling, and swimming. Weird that.
Houghton-Mifflin has been issuing Best of American Sports Writing for years, rotating editors annually. This edition's editor is Richard Ben Cramer, who gives this insight into the selection process - "I tend to like stories that treat a whole life, or at least make a connection between sports and the rest of life." Most of the twenty-six examples here, culled from magazines, newspapers, and web sites, do just that. They run the gamut of sports related topics; baseball - 6 stories, basketball - 5, football -3, running -3, fishing -2, and one each on bicycling, swimming, soccer, horse racing, airplane racing, taxidermy, sports groupies, and other (A personal memoir of sorts by Sports Illustrated's Rick Telander.) A little surprisingly there are no stories on hockey, hunting, boxing, or golf.
Cramer also slights professional football. The football related entries include Charles Stowers' (Dallas Observer) story about 6-man football leagues in Texas high schools, Charles Pierce's (Sports Illustrated) look back at the NFL decision to play games the Sunday after the John Kennedy assassination, and Ira Berkow's (New York Times) short profile of St. John's University's coach John Galiardi. Included are long articles on basketball's Yao Ming, Amare Stoudemire, and Michael Jordan's last season of professional basketball. Maybe the selections would have made more sense to me if I had more interest in basketball and less in football.
In any event, the strength of this book lies elsewhere. Steve Friedman's `The Race of Truth' (Bicycling) is an engrossing story of the troubled speed-racer Graeme Obree. Lynne Cox's `Swimming to Antartica (The New Yorker) is the only entry from a non-professional writer. Cox recounts, in fascinating detail, the preparations and sacrifices she underwent to attempt to swim in the near-freezing waters of Antartica. Stephen Rodricks's appropriately titled `A Long Strange Trip' (Runner's World) profiles Iranian Reza Baluchi, a man who, Forrest Gump-like, is running across the world in the name of peace. Rodrick catches him outside of Hicks Junction, Arkansas. The most harrowing story is Michael Hall's sensitive portrait of Burundi-born Gilbert Tuhabonye in `Running for His Life' (Texas Monthly), which details Tuhabonye's violent youth - beaten, burned, and left for dead in his Hutu versus Tutsi homeland - and his new life as a running coach in Texas.
Incidentally, the stories in Best... 2004 were all written in the calendar year of 2003. Series editor Glenn Stout includes a selection of Notable Sports Writing of 2003, a list of about 100 or so stories (author/title/publication) that apparently were in the running but didn't make the final cut.