The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons)

Lists Notable Articles Sport
October 12, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 13 2 min read

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I’m still fairly new to reading ESPN’s Bill Simmons (and despite his relentless Boston boosterism, I get a kick out of his columns). One reason is that he has some interests beyond the ballfield, quite rare for folks who make a living in sports punditry, and contained within his columns, you’ll sometimes find gems like the list of “best sports pieces ever written” that he dropped into his “Mailbag” this week.

The list is really terrific, and, as much because I want to remember it as I do share it with you, I decided to try to find links to some of these pieces online (or at least to the books that contain them).

Simmons put the list together after a fan asked him whether his recent footnote-adorned column on Manny Ramirez was in tribute to David Foster Wallace. Simmons said no, but that it was a meaningful coincidence. The reader mentioned Wallace’s famous “Federer as Religious Experience” as an exemplary piece of sports writing. Simmons agreed, but said that it is in fact superseded by Wallace’s “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness,” (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) which Simmons calls “one of the single best sports pieces ever written.” He then shares his list of the rest of the best (with the first seven joining “Joyce” as the best ever):

So, literary sports fans, do you have any you want to add to this list? Share in the comments below.

See Also: The New New Journalists, Football Books: A Best Sports Writing Addendum

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.

Quick Hits Sport

An Oral History of Baseball

Quick Hits Sport
January 12, 2004 | 15 books mentioned 2 min read

My soon-to-be-father-in-law has a huge collection of radio programs that he has taped and cataloged over the last two or three decades, and recently he gave me a couple of interesting tapes from the late 80’s. They contain a recorded performance of a baseball-themed show put on by the late baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti and one of my favorite writers, Roger Angell. The show, which is about two hours long, consists of readings of baseball essays, stories, and poetry. The work of John Updike is represented as is that of Garrison Keillor. I was most interested in an excerpt from a book called The Glory of Their Times: The Story of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It, a book that was put together by Lawrence Ritter, an economics professor at NYU. Ritter also happens to be a baseball fan, and shortly after Ty Cobb’s death in 1961, inspired by the outpouring of myth and legend that occasioned Cobb’s passing, Ritter decided to record for posterity an oral history of the early years of professional baseball. Over the next several years Ritter traveled 75,000 miles, crisscrossing the country, tape recorder in hand, seeking out the game’s grizzled veterans. The result is a book that is, I am now learning, cherished by aficionados of baseball literature, and since, I suppose, I must consider myself a member of this group, my copy should be arriving via post shortly.An AddendaI knew I had forgotten at least one of the books I read last year, and I think I forgot because I didn’t actually read it; I listened to it. Thanks to a friend who gave me a copy, Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker by James McManus was my driving companion for a week or so, which both doubled my reading output and made that much more tolerable the vast amount of time that I, like any Angeleno, must spend in his car.

Quick Hits Sport
| 15 books mentioned 2 min read
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Essays Notable Articles

Stieg Larsson: Swedish Narcissus

Essays Notable Articles
September 10, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 101 5 min read
In any other book, I would see these tactics as pandering to the baser instincts of the reading public. But in this book, in which Mikael is so obviously a stand-in for Stieg, it's just tacky. Especially since this Stieg/Mikael amalgamation has also appointed himself head of the Respecting Women Committee.
Essays Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 101 5 min read
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Lists

Millions Meta-Data 2010

Lists
January 5, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 1 4 min read

Before we get too far into 2011, let’s take a look at what was keeping readers interested on The Millions in 2010. To start, we’ll divide the most popular posts on The Millions into two categories, beginning with the 20 most popular pieces published on the site in 2010:

1. Our pair of Most Anticipated posts were popular among readers looking for something new to read.

2. Confessions of a Book Pirate: Our interview with someone actually “pirating” ebooks put a face on a nebulous trend and generated huge interest among readers, the publishing industry, and the media.

3. Stieg Larsson: Swedish Narcissus: The spot-on skewering of the most popular series of books in the world set readers dividing themselves into two camps, pro and con Stieg Larsson.

4. Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons: Has the internet created a new use for a popular punctuation mark? This fun piece suggests that might be the case.

5. Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life Staff writer Kevin Hartnett asked what it means to immerse yourself in a great work of art and found that many readers have been contemplating the same thing.

6. Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K. This unscientific look at book covers had readers taking sides in a trans-Atlantic design debate.

7. In Our Parents’ Bookshelves: In this thoughtful essay, Hartnett wondered what our bookshelves tell other people about us.

8. The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B.R. Myers: Staff writer Garth Hallberg’s epic takedown of the cranky Atlantic book critic had many readers cheering (while some rushed to his defense).

9. The Franzen Cover and a Brief History of Time: Jonathan Franzen’s turn as Time magazine cover boy was probably the literary event of the year, and it inspired us to look back at the other 82 writers who have received the honor.

10. Sex, Seriously: James Salter Trumps the Great Male Novelists: While many critics complain about the clunky, awkward depictions of sex in contemporary fiction, staff writer Sonya Chung pointed readers to a master of the form.

11. Deckle Edge in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A musing on a quirky design element of modern books had us exploring the history of these objects and contemplating their future.

12. Confined By Pages: The Joy of Unread Books: This essay dares to ask: are the best books the ones you haven’t read yet?

13. Orwell and the Tea Party: This astute essay pondered how George Orwell has been co-opted by political movements that he would never have sided with.

14. Ceasing to Exist: Three Months in the Social Media Detox Ward: Staff writer Edan Lepucki tried something many of us wish we could do: she took a break from Facebook and Twitter.

15. 20 More Under 40: The other big literary event of the year was the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” project. We came up with our own list that we hoped was even more interesting.

16. Five Apocalypses: A Particularly Catastrophic Summer Reading List: Everyone was reading apocalyptic books in 2010, and staff writer Emily St. John Mandel offered five such books to read when the power grid goes down.

17. The Sorry State of the Rejection Letter: Staff writer Bill Morris pondered a time when thoughtful rejection letters arrived in the mail on real paper.

18. A Speculative 20 Under 40, from 40 Years Ago: In another response to the New Yorker list, we pondered a star-studded “20 Under 40” from 1970.

19. All Great Works of Literature Either Dissolve a Genre or Invent One: A Reading List: The other, other big literary story of the year was the controversial David Shields. Whichever side you took, his reading list of genre-destroying books was a treat.

20. A Year in Reading: Ed Champion (The 13 Most Underrated Books of 2010): Ed Champion’s list of under-the-radar books was a highlight of our year-end series.

There are also a number of older pieces that Millions readers return to again and again. This list of top “evergreens” comprises pieces that went up before 2010 but continued to interest readers over the last year.

1. The Best of the Millennium (So Far): Our late-2009 series invited a distinguished panel of writers and thinkers to nominate the best books of the decade. The ensuing list stoked controversy and interest that lingered into 2010. The write-ups of the “winner” and runners-up have also remained popular.

2. Best of the Millennium, Pros Versus Readers: We also invited our readers to compile a “best of the decade” list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the readers’ list seemed to receive a warmer reception.

3. A Year in Reading 2009: 2009’s series stayed popular in 2010.

4. The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons): Sports fans love this collection of links to some of the best sports writing of all time.

5. On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections: A terrific list that will keep the short story fan busy for quite a long time.

6. Food Fight: Anthony Bourdain Slams Rachael Ray: This rare dalliance for The Millions into celebrity gossip suggests an enduring interest in the bad blood between these two food (and publishing) superstars.

7. The Road: A Comedic Translation (Part 1): Staff writer Jacob Lambert’s skewering of Cormac McCarthy’s self-serious blockbuster has kept readers laughing for over a year now.

8. The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky: This interview with the world’s most famous working translators has kept readers coming back.

9. Diagramming the Obama Sentence: In the aftermath of Obama’s victory, Garth’s analysis of our new president’s rhetorical skills got picked up on a number of political sites.

10. Introducing Difficult Books, A Descriptive List: Readers have remained interested in our occasional series on some of the toughest — and most rewarding — books out there.

Where did all these readers come from? Google (and Facebook and Twitter and StumbleUpon and Reddit) sent quite a few of course, but many Millions readers came from other sites too. These were the top 10 sites to send us traffic in 2010:

1. Huffington Post
2. Arts & Letters Daily
3. MetaFilter
4. Kottke.org
5. The New Yorker
6. The Rumpus
7. The Complete Review
8. The Elegant Variation
9. Andrew Sullivan
10. The Morning News

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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13 comments:

  4. Gah! This is frustrating. I spent about an hour and a half on Saturday finding the same links. :) You've done it cleaner than I would have, and found all of the Talese links I couldn't.
    Here's the article I'm going to add when I link to here, about Bob Kalsu, the only professional athlete killed in Vietnam.

  5. Soccer?

    (Excellent) novelist Tim Parks wrote a book about following Serie A squad Hellas Verona around Italy for a season (as they tried to avoid relegation – unsuccessfully) with its hardest-core fans called *A Season with Verona,* that's terrific.

    Philip Ball, who covers soccer for The Guardian, wrote a book about Spain, Spanish history, and how it all plays out in Spanish football called *Morbo* that's even better.

  9. Moneyball is so much better written than that excerpt about Michael Jordan. You really get to know the players he profiles, and I teared up at the end.

  10. The best sports book I've read is CLR James' "Beyond a Boundary," which is about cricket but also about sports in general, imperialism, art, race, culture, and the human spirit. It was written in the sixties but still well worth reading, even if like me you have little interest in or understanding of cricket. Particularly worthwhile are his chapters on whether sports can be considered art (the answer is basically yes).

    Here's a great review by Joseph O'Neill (author of Netherland):

    http://www.powells.com/review/2007_09_11.html

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Lists Notable Articles

The Most Anticipated Books of the Rest of 2007

Lists Notable Articles
June 26, 2007 | 15 books mentioned 8 4 min read

With year nearly half over, it’s time once again to look ahead at books that will be arriving in the coming months. 2007 was very much a front-loaded year in terms of big-name literary releases with heavyweights like Delillo, McEwan, Murakami, Lethem, and Chabon all dropping new titles early in the year. The second half of 2007, while it doesn’t have as many headline grabbers (excluding Harry Potter, of course), does have a number of interesting books on offer.September: I’ve already written about the Junot Diaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here’s what I said “The reason I’m so excited about this is that Diaz’s story by the same title in the New Yorker’s 2000 end-of-year fiction issue was one of the best stories that’s appeared in the magazine in the ten years I’ve been reading it. It is a story so good that I still remember talking to various people about it in my then home city of Los Angeles, people with whom I never before or after talked fiction. It was a story that got around. And now, finally, it has blossomed into a book.” Since then, the New Yorker has published another excerpt from the book, in the June 11 & 18 Summer Fiction issue, but the story isn’t available online.Suite Francaise, a posthumously published work by a Russian-born, French novelist who died in the Holocaust was a surprise bestseller in 2006. Though Irene Nemirovsky was a celebrated writer in the 1930s, she had been largely unknown to today’s readers. Now, however, her work is returning to the spotlight. Like Suite Francaise, Fire in the Blood was written during the early years of the war, but only published decades later. Unlike Suite Francaise, Fire in the Blood does not center on the war, instead “it dwells on intense, often repressed emotional conflict set against bucolic country life,” according to the International Herald Tribune where more about the book and Nemirovsky can be found.Songs Without Words is Ann Packer’s follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. Based on some reports from BEA, the book has generated some buzz, but I haven’t seen any early reviews. Publisher Knopf describes the book as a chronicle of a friendship between two women that is shaken when an “adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters” and “the fault lines in the women’s friendship are revealed.” An excerpt from the book is available, too.Denis Johnson has a hefty new tome (600+ pgs) on the way. As Garth pointed out to me when he snagged a galley of the book at BEA, Tree of Smoke has garnered some serious praise from FSG head Jonathan Galassi. His letter from the front of the galley says: “The novel you’re holding is Denis Johnson’s finest work, I believe, and one of the very best books we have ever had the honor to publish. Tree of Smoke has haunted me in the sense that I’ve thought about it and dreamed about it since I finished reading it, and the impression it left has only deepened over time. I think it is a great book, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have.” (via SoT)Richard Russo is taking something of a departure from his usual terrain in upstate New York with his new novel Bridge of Sighs. The book’s protagonist Louis Charles “Lucy” Lynch hales from upstate Thomaston, but the book’s action takes place partly in Venice where Lucy goes with his wife to find a childhood friend. From the sound of it, Russo stays true to the themes and tone of his past books but broadens the geography a bit.October: Ann Patchett, author of big seller Bel Canto has a new book coming out called Run. Patchett recently told Amazon the book is “about a man who is the former mayor of Boston, who has three sons and who has political ambitions for his sons that perhaps one of them would go on to be president, and he pushes them in that direction.” Or if you want a snappier blurb: “Joe Kennedy meets The Brothers Karamazov,” which sounds more than a little intriguing. Curious readers can listen to Patchett reading from the book courtesy WGBH Boston.In my early days as a bookseller, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones was one of the first bestsellers I encountered from that side of the retail equation. I came to understand that this meant having a copy of the book within reach at all times since requests for it came unabated. At one point I even had the book’s ISBN memorized from ringing it up so frequently. Sebold and her publisher will undoubtedly be hoping for similar success with her follow-up novel The Almost Moon. USA Today recently ratcheted up the hype by revealing the book’s first sentence: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”Tom Perotta’s last book, Little Children got noticed both because of good reviews and because Pepperidge Farm made publisher St. Martin’s take its goldfish crackers off the cover (they were replaced by chocolate chip cookies). Perrotta’s new book, The Abstinence Teacher depicts no food whatsoever on the cover. The book treads Perrotta’s usual turf: the raw underbelly of suburbia. Following in the footsteps of Election, another Perrotta novel, a film version of The Abstinence Teacher is said to be in the works.Perhaps the “biggest” book yet to come out during the second half of this year, though, will be Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. Billed as the final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost follows Zuckerman back to New York where he is seeing a doctor but is waylaid when chance encounters stir things up in the way things get stirred up in Roth novels. An early look from PW is less than impressed – “the plot is contrived.” A random blogger offers a different opinion. With the publication date several months away, the jury is still out.The above are the forthcoming books that have caught my eye, but I’m sure I’ve missed some good ones. Tell us about them in the comments.

Lists Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 8 4 min read
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Lists

Ten Things I’ve Learned over 12 Years of Sending Out Stories

Lists
September 6, 2011 | 15 books mentioned 20 4 min read

1. Mark Farrington, my first writing teacher at the Johns Hopkins MA Program in Writing in the fall of 1998, suggested we should start sending our stories out “when they are as good as we can make them.” That may seem obvious, but I’ve found it to be a great rule of thumb. Perhaps you’ve had several rounds of feedback, you’ve revised, and while you still see problems, you don’t know how to fix them. When you’ve taken a story as far as you can on your own, send it out.

2. Send stories out broadly – ten to twenty journals at a time. This is particularly important if, over time, you hope to receive useful feedback. Since sending my first story out in January, 1999, I’ve sent to 225 journals, contests, or competitive retreats; I’ve received 219 rejections and had six stories published. But I’ve received some kind of encouragement – from formal letters to “send more” checked on a postcard – from 71 publications, about one-third of all my submissions.

3. Aim high. Make a list of the top tier journals you’d love to have your story published in, then start at the top and move down. I submitted my very first story in 1999 to 12 places, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Zoetrope, and Virginia Quarterly Review. While the odds are very low, any feedback you receive can keep you going.

4. Another of Farrington’s suggestions I’ve tried to follow religiously over the years: Send only to journals that pay – however little. Sure, writers should be paid for their work, but this is not just a question of principle. Payment (cash – not contributor’s copies) signifies an added seriousness, a heightened commitment to the piece being published. Using pay as a guide crisply sorts journals into two categories: those that do; those that don’t. While there are certainly serious, respectable journals that don’t or can’t pay, by and large payment is an efficient surrogate for quality.*

5. Send smartly. Read a journal’s submissions guidelines. Pay attention to page limits and manuscript needs. Don’t send to AGNI in July. Don’t send Fence a hard copy manuscript (they only take electronic). Most writers I know don’t read all the journals they send to in advance. But at the very least familiarize yourself with a journal’s unique pulse before sending, or take your lumps. Perhaps the most embarrassing (and humbling) rejection I received came from the Chariton Review, then published through the English Department at Brigham Young University: “Sorry – but we can’t consider anything with an f word in it. You surely must know that BYU is church-sponsored.”

6. Find out which journals respond personally to your work, and keep sending them stories. Even if they never take one, you’re likely to get a steady stream of feedback. Keep a file, tabbed by journal, of all the responses you receive – whether a letter from an editor or a form “send again” card; good, bad, or otherwise – so you can track them over time.

7. When you get a positive response, always reference it when sending your next story. Do this even if all you’ve received is a scribbled, unsigned “nice work” or an auspicious check mark. Sometimes, someone will initial their comments. Take the time to look them up online, and address your next story to them. I’ve started many letters: “Thank you for your encouraging note about my last story…” This immediately establishes your relationship with the journal, and can help lift your story off the slush pile.

8. Don’t take rejection personally. Every writer knows this, and yet it’s one of the toughest things to truly internalize. I once received an email from the Paris Review that felt, well, pretty personal: “I just finished ‘Innkeeping’ … I found it able but not, to be honest, terribly distinctive, and the tone sort of YA – not for us, I’m afraid.” I consider myself fairly well steeled, and, still, the email stung. Less than two months later, though, I received another email, from Field Maloney at the New Yorker: “I want to apologize for our taking so long to get back to you on ‘Innkeeping.’…I enjoyed reading this one – the voice is natural and distinctive – and I’d be glad to read more of your fiction in the future.” I keep both notes in their separate files, with a Post-It note on the Paris Review comments, reminding me of the New Yorker’s.

9. If you are fortunate enough to get a story accepted, immediately write or email the other journals where the story is still under consideration, letting them know your story has been placed.

10. Celebrate rejection. I’m not kidding. Each rejection is a chance you gave your story to live in the minds of readers; each, an opportunity to toughen your writerly skin. Mark milestone rejections by subscribing to the journal that didn’t take you. I did this when I received my 200th rejection – and in so doing, I owned the rejection, instead of letting it own me. Now, each month when One Story arrives, I’m reminded of my triumph.

*I recently contacted Farrington, still an instructor and faculty adviser at Hopkins, to run this piece by him. He said while he still recommends writers submit to journals that pay, he offered this addendum: “Sometimes there will be a story that you sincerely believe is finished – it doesn’t need to be revised, or put on a shelf for awhile, it is what it is – but it’s not a story that’s had success with the top tier journals. That’s a story I would feel absolutely fine about sending to a journal that doesn’t pay.”

Bonus Link: My Life in Stories

Image credit: gbSk/Flickr

Lists
| 15 books mentioned 20 4 min read
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