In the half-century since its birth, as Sports Illustrated grew from a struggling start-up to America's preeminent sports magazine, one thing has remained constant: the commitment to great storytelling. That part of the magazine's mission has always been easy to define: Identify the most compelling sports stories of our time and get the best writers in the business to tell them. This book brings together a lineup of writing talent worthy of the Hall of Fame and the classic stories they produced for Sports Illustrated over the past 50 years. Many of the writers whose work is collected here are longtime favorites of SI readers (Frank Deford, Rick Reilly, Steve Rushin, Gary Smith). Others are former SI staffers or contributors who left the fold, but not before making an indelible mark on SI's history (Dan Jenkins, Rick Telander, Mark Kram, Roy Blount Jr., William Nack). There are celebrated journalists (A.J. Liebling, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton), screenwriters (Budd Schulberg and Kenny Moore), renowned novelists (Thomas McGuane, Pete Dexter, Wallace Stegner, Don DeLillo) and even a couple of Nobel Prize winners in literature (William Faulkner and John Steinbeck). The stories themselves are a mirror of our times. Included in this volume are accounts of some of the most memorable athletic feats of our era (Secretariat's Belmont victory, the Thrilla in Manila, and Bobby Thomson's shot heard round the world). Profiles of the towering athletic figures of our time (Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, Ted Williams and Johnny Unitas). Good guys (Yogi Berra and Harry Caray) and bad guys (Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson). The fast (Roger Bannister) and the furious (Dick Butkus). The ridiculous (Howard Cosell) and the sublime (Josh Gibson). And the stories that simply touch our hearts and inspire us (Frank Deford's masterpiece on light heavyweight champ Billy Conn). This is the very best of the world's best sports magazine ¾ and it just doesn't get any better than that.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
For their 50th anniversary, Sports Illustrated collects 52 of their best and most memorable articles. Editor Rob Fleder delivers on what makes the magazine standout and fashionable: a mix of on-sport reporting (Mark Kram's lyrical coverage of the third Ali-Frazier bout) and polished articles written with years of perspective (Dan Jenkins's examination of the 1960 US Open, 18 years after the golf tournament). SI's most well-know scribe, Frank Deford, bookends the collection with reflections on boxer Billy Conn and a lovely obit on hometown star Johnny Untias. There is a sweet array of noted authors including John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Pete Dexter, Don DeLillo, and Garrison Keillor. Profiles are the bulk of the book, but like the magazine, we take off-beat trails: a rattlesnake derby, articles on broadcasters, and Wallace Stegner's sobering "We Are Destroying Our National Parks" (written in 1955!). Since there has been other SI collections over the years (Yesterday in Sport one of note), fresher articles are more abundant (eight articles from the 21st Century). As with any survey book, one can be picky about the exclusions: no Olympic coverage; the only article on cars deals with the Autobahn; hockey is only represented through an ex-player's murder case. The biggest caveat is a book without pictures from a magazine famous for them. Certainly a single shot of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile or one of the blurry photos that originally accompanied George Plimpton's ultimate April Fools' Day joke (pitching sensation Sidd Finch) would evoke the memory of those who read the articles upon their release. --Doug Thomas
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Sports Illustrated set out to raise the bar for sports writing when it debuted in 1954. Longtime editor Andre Laguerre, who stepped down in 1976, pushed his writers to take their work beyond the cliches, statistics, and humdrum details of the daily sports pages. He also looked beyond his staff for the best writer for a subject. Among those who contributed to the magazine are Robert Frost, John F. Kennedy, William Faulkner, and A. J. Liebling. The selections included here run the gamut from the silly to the profound, but each in its way exemplifies the lofty ambitions to which the magazine aspires. Among the highlights are William Nack' s examination of former boxing champion Sonny Liston, 20 years after his death; an ode to Ted Williams by Leigh Montville; and Jeff MacGregor's account of an Oklahoma rattlesnake roundup, which will have readers' skin crawling even as they wipe tears of laughter from their eyes. One might quibble over a favorite piece that's been left out, but there's no argument that each selection included is a shimmering example of the best of sports journalism. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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More About the Author
John Schulian, who has had two careers as a writer, one in newspapers, the other in Hollywood, was born in Los Angeles in 1945 and reared there and in Salt Lake City. Before establishing himself as a nationally-syndicated sports columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, he was a copy editor at the Salt Lake Tribune, a cityside reporter and pop music columnist at the Baltimore Evening Sun, and a sports writer at the Washington Post. He moved to Chicago in 1977 as a sports columnist at that city's Daily News. When the paper folded 13 months later, he shifted to the Sun-Times, where he won a National Headliner Award in 1979, was regularly in included in E.P. Dutton's annual "Best Sports Stories" anthology, and published a highly-regarded collection of his boxing writing, "Writers' Fighters and Other Sweet Scientists." Rupert Murdoch purchased the Sun-Times in 1984 and Schulian left less than six months later after a dust-up with one of Murdoch's editors. He landed at the Philadelphia Daily News long enough to win the 1985 Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism, and then took off for Hollywood at the invitation of Steven Bochco, creator of "Hill Street Blues." Schulian broke into TV with an "L.A. Law" script and moved on to work on the writing staffs of "Miami Vice," "The 'Slap' Maxwell Story," and "Wiseguy." He was a writer-producer on "Midnight Caller," "Reasonable Doubts," and "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" before he struck gold as a co-creator of "Xena: Warrior Princess," which became, for a while, the world's foremost syndicated TV series. Schulian later wrote and produced such series as "JAG," "Outer Limits," and "Tremors" while keeping his hand in the printed word. A collection of his baseball writing, "Twilight of the Long-ball Gods," was published in 2005, and he has written for Sports Illustrated, GQ, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Oxford American, Inside Sports, Sport, Playboy, and msnbc.com. His journalism has been anthologized in "The Best American Sports Writing," "Reading the Fights," "Sports Illustrated's 50 Years of Great Writing," and "Sports Illustrated's Great Football Writing." He has also had short stories published in the Prague Revue and on thuglit.com. Schulian is the editor of "The John Lardner Reader" and co-editor, with George Kimball, of two anthologies, "The Fighter Still Remains: A Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song from Ali to Zevon" and "At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing," the latter due from Library of America in Spring 2011. A general collection of Schulian's sportswriting, "Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand," is tentatively scheduled for publication in Fall 2011.
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