Publication Date: October 10, 2007 | Series: Best American Sports Writing
For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this absorbing collection, featuring twenty-eight of the finest pieces from the past year, has something for everyone. Guest editor David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has assembled a fresh crop of the people and stories that dominated the sports world in 2006.
Michael Lewis gives a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary football coach Bill Parcells. Bob Hohler delves in the murky waters of modern amateur basketball, where teams blatantly dole out cash to players and shoe companies set their sights on prospects as young as twelve. William Rhoden traces the fate of an unknown filly injured on the racetrack. Jeff MacGregor describes the unforgettable Friars Club roast of boxing's provocative promoter Don King. Daniel Coyle follows a forty-year-old Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete. L. Jon Wertheim tells of a young pro-basketball player who found himself wrestling the shoe bomber Richard Reid to the ground during a transatlantic flight. And Derek Zumsteg provides a hilarious and utterly original in-depth account of the baseball career of Bugs Bunny, “the greatest banned player ever.”
These pieces and many more go beyond the spotlight, revealing the people and issues that make sports so relevant and important to all of us.
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"Crackerjack writing from some of the country's best-known sports journalists." (Publishers Weekly )
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Glenn Stout is the author, editor or ghostwriter of nearly eighty books, including the groundbreaking Boston Globe bestseller Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year, bestsellers Red Sox Century and Yankees Century, and the critically acclaimed Nine Months at Ground Zero, The Best American Sports Writing, and Young Woman and The Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the Worldand his own award winning juvenile sports biography series - "Good Sports." Glenn is available to make author visits to schools, deliver lectures on the history of Fenway Park and make other speaking engagements.
Born in Ohio and a graduate of Bard College, Glenn is dual citizen of the United States and Canada and lives in Vermont with his family, two cats, one dog and one rabbit on Lake Champlain. Before becoming a writer Glenn did construction work, served as a security guard, a painter, and worked in libraries. Glenn invites his readers to his blog, to join his facebook page for The Best American Sports Writing, or to visit his website, glennstout.net. Educators interested in arranging an "author visit" to their school can find information on Glenn's Good Sports website www.goodsportsbyglennstout or query Glenn directly at basweditor@yahoo.com.
Most of the books in this series have been excellent. This is the rare exception. I want to read what the title promises -- the best of the previous year's writing. This completely fails to deliver, in what I suspect was an attempt by this editor (who hopefully won't be asked to play this role again) to assemble what amounts to a sideshow of sports largely ignored by the public -- for good reason, as you'll discover by reading. The writing is average at best and the subjects are just not that interesting.
This book takes for you for a loop in that you think that the major sports are going to be covered in baseball, football, basketball and maybe some hockey. The first chapter is actually about racoon hunting and the next one is a satire about Bugs Bunny if he played in an actual baseball game.
In fact here is a list of the additional sports covered in this book:
-High school "futbol" -High school football -Former NFL player Jake Scott's wherabouts today -Mark McGwire in retirement -The first $100,000 bonus given to a baseball player -Horseracing -Don King & boxing -Olympic skiier Bode Miller -Cycling -A woman race-car driver -Fishing -Surboarding -Bill Parcells -John Cheney -Red Aurbach -Shady HS Basketball sneaker company recruiting -Travel baseball -Former college football star's life after serious injury -Pickup basketball games -Pool -Former college basketball player's encounter with stopping the shoe bomber -Iraqi soccer -Running -Rodeos -Turkey hunting
I am giving this book 5 stars to off-set the one-star rating because this book doesn't deserve that low of a rating. Most of the short-stories are from well-respected publications and notable authors. It is hard to read this book straight through because of the variety of the work, but it was a very high quality read.
If it's fall, it must be time for the book of best American sports writing to come out. This has filled out a niche nicely during the past 16 years or so, following a tradition that dates back into the 1940's.
The formula is the same for the 2007 edition of the book. Glenn Stout narrows down the field or candidates, and David Maraniss makes the final selections about what goes in the book. Maraniss has written top-notch biographies of Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi, so he's well-qualified for the job here.
Now, the tough part about a review of this is that it comes down to personal taste. All of the stories will be well done; that's almost a given. Your opinion of a particular year will depend on how you react to the tastes of a particular editor.
In this year's case, Maraniss went in some unexpected directions. A Slovenian cyclist? A woman race car driver from Brazil? Snook? All of these stories will have their supporters among readers of the book, while others might fight them a little too "out there."
Then again, the "out there" stories can offer the biggest surprise. "Talking Turkey" by Bill Buford is about a man who likes to raise wild animals personally, and then release them into the wilderness. It might be difficult to explain the sports connection here, although some of the story connects with hunting, but no matter the category it's an unusual and fascinating tale.
Other personal favorites this time around:
* Derek Zumsteg's "Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever" -- Takes an old cartoon baseball game and tries to make scientific sense out of it. Absolutely unique.
* William Finnegan's "Blank Monday," about a huge change in the surfboard manufacturing business....
* Robert Huber's "The Madness of John Chaney," a fine profile of the unconventional basketball coach.
* Eli Saslow's "A New Game Plan," a story about how a football player recovered enough from a severe on-field brain injury to try to lead a more normal life.
* And on a personal level -- speaking as a running writer -- it was nice to see "A Moment of Silence" and "Team Hoyt Starts Again" included from Runner's World magazine. Take any runner, and the odds are very good that he or she will have a good story attached.
Add it up, and "The Best American Sports Writing 2007" definitely is worth your time and effort. As usual.Read more ›
No way is this collection worthy of only one star. There are too many good or better than good stories, as David Maraniss mixed it up to include a lot of different sports. His focus is on the human element, not actual game stories or their immediate aftermath, as they usually are far too ephemeral for a collection, not matter how sharply done.
The challenge for this particular set is that only a few are at all memorable enough to stick with you after completion. Too many are not that interesting or are nothing special or simply didn't appeal to me, such as the one on John Cheney and the odd take on Bugs Bunny.
My favorites were the high school football game that went 73-72, the running Hoyts, surfing technology, the Saturday hoops tradition, and Jake Scott. The surfing was a nice touch, as it was on a subject about which few readers probably have a clue, making it especially fresh and informative.
If you are only interested in a single sport or two, look elsewhere.
I bought most of the books in this series and gave them for Christmas gifts. My husband loves the Sports pages, so I gave him this book. He said the book has very few good stories, very poor writing in many of them. He said he felt that the editor decided he needed to have one story about each sport, rather than the best stories about a few sports.
