Customer Reviews

The Best American Sports Writing 2004 (The Best American Series)

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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.