Misogyny and Other Occupational Hazards of Women Sportswriters
Of course women are sports fans! Obviously, they can write about sports! This shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, yet here we are.
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Sportswriting: A 2,000-Year History
Hemingway became the first American literary author to be lionized as a famous sportsman, and the rugged outdoorsy persona of “Papa” Hemingway was a masculine icon for a generation of American men. But the author eventually couldn’t stand being “Papa” and shot himself.
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Death of a Soviet Netminder
Sometimes you admire someone’s ability to endure more than someone else’s ability to dominate in more favorable circumstances.
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What Is It About Baseball? W.P. Kinsella, José Fernández, and the Dust of the 2016 Season
Baseball can do that, I guess. It can remind you of everything that once mattered to you, everything that matters still. It can brush the great promise of tomorrow against the agreeable sting of the past, and the sorrows of today.
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Running in the Wake
What better way to test my fortitude than by hammering my head with the legendarily impenetrable Irish jibberish of Finnegans Wake? If I can run 20 yammering nonsensical miles, then an extra six with folks cheering most of the way instead: easy, right? Maybe easier.
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The Revolution Has Been Televised: On Big Sports and Big Money
In 1966, baseball’s reserve clause that bound a player to one team meant that the average major league player’s salary was $14,000. Topps paid each exactly $125 to put them on a bubble-gum card.
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The $ick Lie of Mar¢h Madne$$
Many of the kids who play college basketball today are insanely talented. Too bad they’re being so shamelessly exploited.
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Hanging ‘Em Up: On Reading About (and Not Watching) Sports
All of this would suggest that I’m a boxing fan, one of those old-timey cigar-chewers eager to overlook the sport’s myriad problems and mainstream insignificance in order to enjoy its brutal purity. But despite boxing’s outsize presence in my reading, I’m not particularly interested in it.
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Shaggy Grass, Seaside Golf, and French Theory: A Review of Cabot Links
Despite the efforts of the Cabot PR machine and the love sprinkled upon the course by the big golf magazines, a properly insufferable postmodernist has to, in the end, refuse its existence. Yes, Cabot lets you pretend you’re on a true links. But you aren’t. It was just built to seem that way, just as more or less every links course anywhere must be considered as some combination of real and fake.
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And Then We Pick: On Ed Caesar’s ‘Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon’
Seconds don’t come cheap in elite racing, and the two-hour marathon, at least when Caesar was writing his book, was still 218 seconds away.
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Requiem for a Sports Column: On Mike Lupica and the Daily News
Lupica not only made me want to become a writer; he made me want to be a persuasive and convincing one. He taught me the value of having a viewpoint and seeing it through.
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Stodgy, Slow, Sacred: Fathers and Sons and Baseball
This is why baseball matters so much to me. In an era of relentless change, here is one thing that has remained constant without losing its capacity to dazzle. Here is one thing a dad and an eight-year-old can talk about without either one having to pretend to be interested.
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Scorebooks and Commonplace Books
Though the scorebook does occasionally record the spectacular, for the most part its method is antithetical to the commonplace book. One chronicles the monotonous; the other collects the exceptional.
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Why Big-Time College Football Sucks
America has been "reduced to grateful infantilism by the game of football."
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To Hell with All that Guilty Love: On Steve Almond’s ‘Against Football’
Wrapping up issues of corporate welfare, media sycophancy, sanctioned brutality, and beating them with an angry stick, Almond’s screed is less an assault on football than the organization that aids and abets its worst behavior.
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Dan Epstein on the Hairy Goofy Polyester Glory of 1970s Baseball
In Epstein I discovered a smart writer who actually reveled in the cheesiness of the 1970s. And he did it without the killing smirk of irony.
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The Scourge of the Peloton: On Tim Krabbé’s The Rider
In honor of the Tour de France, taking to the couch with Tim Krabbé's sports classic.
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The Starting Six: On the Remarkable Glory Days of Iowa Girls Basketball
Girls basketball was part of the culture. Each spring the TV broadcasts from the capacity crowds at the state’s largest arena in Des Moines took over one of the three stations our antenna received, and it was largely from these games that I learned the names of small town Iowa: Grundy Center, Montezuma, What Cheer.
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