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 Simmons agreed, but said that it is in fact superseded by Wallace’s “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm for Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and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.

Notable Articles The Future of the Book

Google Settlement Could Change the Literary Landscape

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
October 30, 2008 | 15 books mentioned 9 4 min read

After once being a hot topic, prompting many in publishing to vocally take sides, the dispute between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers simmered quietly in lawyers’ offices for more than two years. But this week Google’s book scanning effort was back in the news with the announcement of a $125 million settlement. What may have been lost in this news is that Google is suddenly poised to drive a massive change in the publishing marketplace, multiply by many times the number of books available at the fingertips of readers, and supercharge the market for online delivery of books.The original Google Book Search controversy erupted almost immediately after Google first launched the feature, then called Google Print. To many, it seemed like an almost impossible effort but somehow Google had the will and resources to deliver on an incredible promise: all of the world’s books – and therefore, some would say, all of the world’s knowledge – digitized, searchable, and preserved for future generations. But some publishers, many of them divisions of media conglomerates and made vigilant by the piracy that had ravaged the music industry, were wary of Google’s intentions and feared a frenzy of unfettered book-swapping.In part, the controversy stemmed from confusion about what Google was up to and the knee-jerk notion that digitized books would quickly be coursing across the internet, freely available to anyone who wanted them. Essentially, the search giant was dividing books into three categories. Google would work with publishers on in-print, copyrighted books via its “Partner Program,” which makes previews of the books available, provides “buy this book” links, and includes a revenue share for the ads displayed next to those books’ pages. Out-of-print, public domain books, meanwhile, were freely scanned and made fully available by Google. But it was the third category, out-of-print books that are still under copyright, that caused the most angst.This angst was compounded by Google’s methods; the search engine had gone around the copyright holders and brokered deals with universities to scan the contents of libraries containing millions of volumes. Google assured publishers that, by default, only snippets of these books would be displayed and that the snippets were protected by fair use, but this promise – and its legal justification – were not enough to soothe the publishers and the Authors Guild, so they sued. Publishers’ pique, however, seemed to go beyond the issue of fair use and instead seemed to be rooted in a desire to push back against what was viewed as Google’s arrogance and to exercise control, as absolutely as was possible, over their copyrighted works.This notion of control was a common thread through many of the responses of publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing’s Nigel Newton said “Publishers also have the responsibility to make sure that when it comes to hosting electronic content in future, it is their own websites that host the downloads and the scans of text and audio. There is no reason to hand this content to third-party websites.” This was echoed at the Association of American Publishers: “‘If Google can make…copies, then anyone can,’ Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a phone interview. ‘Anybody could go into a library and start making digital copies of anything,’ she said.” And HarperCollins and others pushed their own digitizing efforts, resulting in widgets and beefed up publisher websites. These anti-Google voices were offset by a cacophony of authors and publishers who dissented and were open to Google’s experiment, including Richard Nash of Soft Skull and several others.But now, after after more than two years of negotiating, a resolution has emerged that, if approved by a US district court to resolve still pending lawsuits, could mark a major change in the availability of books.The big change comes in that nettlesome category: out-of-print, copyrighted books. Here’s how Google describes its proposed plan for those books:Until now, we’ve only been able to show a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books we’ve scanned through our Library Project. Since the vast majority of these books are out of print, to actually read them you’d have to hunt them down at a library or a used bookstore. This agreement will allow us to make many of these out-of-print books available for preview, reading and purchase in the U.S.And what’s key is how Google plans to make these books available: “Once this agreement has been approved, you’ll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.” With those two sentences, the number of books available to readers – Google has estimated that 80% of the books in libraries are out of print – will increase substantially. In addition, by making these books available for sale, a new revenue stream will be opened for publishers (the books will also be available via institutional subscriptions offered to libraries and the like). There are no estimates on how big this number might be but it represents new money both for publishers and for writers whose books are out of print. Perhaps dislocated by this, meanwhile, are thousands of booksellers (not to mention Amazon), whose used book businesses are often times the easiest way for a person to get their hands on many out-of-print books. If a reader doesn’t need to own the physical book, Google will be an enticing option, particularly since it seems very likely that books offered through Google Book Search would be cheaper.The Association of American Publishers FAQ on the deal notes one of the ways the books will be priced: “Google will automatically set and adjust prices through an algorithm designed to maximize revenues for the book. This algorithm will be based on multiple factors.” So, as Google brings its algorithm magic to pricing out-of-print books, it seems sure to impact the pricing across the whole market. In addition, publishers and authors have long bemoaned that they are cut out of the revenue in a used book market that has only grown larger thanks to the internet. It would seem that the Google deal will now give them a way to reach out to at least a slice of those used book buyers.But perhaps more important than the new revenue for publishers will be the huge increase in access to a large new subset of books, in one stroke bringing back millions of out-of-print books from oblivion. While this may not excite the casual reader, it represents a great expansion of the amount of knowledge that is fully searchable and at our fingertips and it has the potential to be a great boon to scholars.Over the last decade, the internet has wrecked many old media business models. Despite my frustration at their initial recalcitrance, the publishers were right to protect their business model, and both Google and the publishers should be lauded if this agreement results in the creation of a new one.

Notable Articles The Future of the Book
| 15 books mentioned 9 4 min read
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Reviews Sport

Gay Talese’s The Silent Season of a Hero is Sports Writing That’s Destined to Last

Reviews Sport
November 3, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 4 min read

Reading The Silent Season of a Hero, a new collection of sports writing by the venerable Gay Talese, is a bit like watching time-lapse photography of a rose blooming.  In the course of this 308-page book, we see a raw teenage sportswriter become a college columnist with obvious talent, then a polished reporter for a daily newspaper, and finally blossoming into a master of the long narrative form once favored by our best magazines.

It’s thrilling to witness this process of maturation.  Much of the credit goes to Michael Rosenwald, a staff writer at the Washington Post who selected the book’s 39 pieces and wrote short, illuminating essays that introduce each of its five sections.  He sometimes quotes Talese to great effect.  For instance, in praising Talese’s skill as a reporter, Rosenwald writes: “The ability to make people comfortable enough to reveal things they have never told their wives or mistresses is one of the unseen strengths of Talese’s career.”  To which Talese adds, “What I think is important and what influences people to let me in the door, it’s because my manner is courteous.  I want to hear about their lives.  I want to listen.”  In the case of the rough-edged entourage that surrounded the boxer Floyd Patterson, Talese says, “There’s a sadness about them and when someone would talk to them decently, as I did, they sort of opened up to me.”

Tom Wolfe famously touted Talese’s 1962 Esquire magazine article on Joe Louis in retirement as the piece of writing that spawned The New Journalism.  Talese isn’t having it.  As he explains in this book’s introduction, he had spent years prior to 1962 trying to figure out ways to use the devices of fiction – “scene-setting, dialogue, drama, conflict” – in non-fiction.  He cites such specific early influences as the short stories of Hemingway and John O’Hara, “Winter Dreams” by Fitzgerald, “The Jockey” by Carson McCullers and “The Eighty-Yard Run” by Irwin Shaw.  By the time he graduated from his Ocean City, N.J., high school newspaper and hometown weekly to the undergrad newspaper at the University of Alabama, he was also emulating the sports columnists Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Dan Parker.

It was at the New York Times from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s that Talese’s unique penchants and gifts began to pay off.  He is, in essence, an old-school reporter – but with a critical difference.  He does the legwork, he has a sharp eye for the telling detail, he gets people to open up and then he writes down what they say – but along the way he also mastered what he calls “the art of hanging out.”  The art of becoming part of his subject’s world.  Of absorbing things until he has absorbed the essence of the story he needs to tell.  The stories written for the Times often revolved around the sporting world’s invisible people, boxing referees, timekeepers, horseshoe makers, bare-knuckle fighters, agents, midget wrestlers.  As good as these stories are – quirky, sharply observed, beautifully written – they’re warm-ups for the main event.

One of my favorite elements in the book is photocopies of six dense pages of notes Talese typed while getting ready to write about the New York Yankees’ final road trip in their disastrous 1979 season.  Fragmentary, riddled with typos, sometimes nearly incoherent, these six pages nonetheless open a window into Talese’s creative process – how he sketches scenes, pulls together scraps of dialogue, lays out the ethnic and regional and class differences between the ballplayers and the sportswriters, even the music coming out of the players’ ubiquitous radios.  It’s a string of buzzy, electric riffs, like an athlete getting pumped up in the locker room before taking the field.  It’s fascinating.

Two crucial aspects of Talese’s temperament are also revealed in this book: he is indifferent to the results of contests – to news – but he is fascinated by how those results affect the contestants.  Especially when they lose.  Floyd Patterson could have been speaking for Talese when he said this about the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston: “We’ll find out what he’s like after somebody beats him, how he takes it.  It’s easy to do anything in victory.  It’s in defeat that a man reveals himself.”  (For an answer to Patterson’s musings, I refer you to Nick Tosches’s superb impressionistic little book The Devil and Sonny Liston.)

Even more fascinating to Talese than failure is the murky downslope of greatness, the twilight of storied careers, the ways stars must struggle to get their bearings after the cheering stops.  This fascination led to Talese’s classic Esquire articles from the 1960s about Patterson (“The Loser”), Joe Louis (“The King as a Middle-Aged Man”) and Joe DiMaggio (“The Silent Season of a Hero”).

Eventually the cheering faded for Talese, too.  When he was in his mid-sixties, half a dozen magazines turned down his brilliant article about Muhammad Ali meeting Fidel Castro in Havana, which is included here and which Talese regards as his finest piece of work.  Eventually Esquire buried it at the back of its September 1996 issue.

Talese, now pushing 80, is still working.  He published a memoir, A Writer’s Life, in 2007.  He has new books in the works.  As for being inventor of The New Journalism, Talese says, “I have always thought of myself as rather traditional in my approach, and not so ‘new.’  I never wanted to do something new.  I wanted to do something that would hold up over time, something that could get old and still have the same resonance.”

As this book demonstrates, that is precisely what he has done.

Reviews Sport
| 15 books mentioned 4 min read
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Essays Notable Articles

Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

Essays Notable Articles
March 16, 2010 | 15 books mentioned 46 5 min read

In the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written.  As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess.  But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects.  And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Essays Notable Articles
| 15 books mentioned 46 5 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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Essays Sport

Death of a Soviet Netminder

Essays Sport
July 6, 2017 | 15 books mentioned 1 4 min read

Recently it was announced, almost as a hockey footnote, that Russian goalie Sergei Mylnikov had died at age 58, another of the Soviet stars of the 1970s and 1980s to meet with premature death.

The goalie had left the Soviet Union and appeared in ten forgettable games for a historically bad Quebec Nordiques during the 1989-90 season, never to tend an NHL crease again. He played some more back in the Soviet Union after that, and then in Sweden, his career coming to an end in the mid-1990s. I assume the news of his death was broadcast at all primarily because of Mylnikov’s role in the 1987 Canada Cup series, the drama of which remains peerless in hockey history. This was a best-on-best international tournament featuring many of the greatest hockey players ever to play, smack in the middle of their primes.

That Soviet squad may have been the second-best team in hockey history, after the Canadian team that just barely squeaked past them. The Soviets’s issue was largely in net, where they were unable to settle on a reliable goalie. You had the sense that Viktor Tikhonov, the Soviet coach, didn’t really trust Mylnikov, or like him that much. He was supposed to be an up-and-coming star, but clearly he had holes in his game. There must have been a ton of pressure on him, given the Soviet realities of the time, with the Communist party leaning so heavily on sports teams like this hockey squad, while so many Soviet players were thinking earnestly about the possibilities — and real chances — of life outside of the Soviet system.

I recall watching those three 1987 Canada Cup games as a boy, thinking they were the finest hockey matches I’d ever seen, a belief that deepened over time as I rewatched the games in adulthood.

Sometimes people you didn’t know, who weren’t blessed, maybe, or cursed, with unique talents or singular gifts, can have a real bearing on your life, perhaps in part due to being on the right stage at the same time — and perhaps due to a little something extra, as well. Mylnikov reentered my life five years ago, in the late spring of 2012. I was living, briefly, at what had been my house in Rockport, Massachusetts. My wife at the time was having an affair, as I’d learn four years later. She had put in motion an elaborate scheme to leave in the middle of the night, take the house, take my life, all without any explanation, leaving me to piece through the scraps and loose ends and lacuna of a mystery over the ensuing years. And, too, leaving me to work 130 hour weeks over those years, in an attempt to get my house back at some point, love it as I did, as I do.

But I was there by myself for about a month before the hell of the courts kicked in. I was a broken man, and not one who was able to fight. I could survive, but not fight. Maybe you’ve been there, or your version of there. What I did do, though, was write.

During those lonely days, in this place I knew I’d be leaving, just as I knew I’d be fighting to return, I filled up page after page with words. Words of short stories, words in a novel, words for magazines and newspapers. Not that I knew it then, but I was changing as a person and as an artist, and getting faster, with notions of productivity and creation redefined, while everything in my mind seemed to go in slower motion, even as so much came tome with greater rapidity.

I wrote myself not senseless, but almost lifeless, as in to the verge of what someone can ask of one’s self. At night I just drank, and then I’d try to pass out. Not from the alcohol, which wouldn’t dull my thoughts or my feelings, but to black out from reality for a couple hours.

The night terrors had set in by then, and it was unrealistic to think that I’d get more than two hours’ worth of sleep, but I’d only even come by those two hours because I’d pop in a DVD of one of the three games of that 1987 Canada Cup final.

I knew the plays by heart. Then there was the voice of play-by-play man Dan Kelly, which seemed to soothe me. I was also more interested than usual in how Mylnikov was discussed, as this young man of promise, who was under unbelievable pressure.

He felt, in my view, like a man marooned in some ways. His only chance to unmaroon himself, as it were, was to play up to the full range of his potential. No one else was going to assist him, no help was forthcoming, save what he could do for himself.

As you might know, all three games of that final series ended in 6-5 scores. They weren’t exactly goaltender battles, but if ever there were displays of great goaltending — from time to time — in high-scoring hockey games, this would be the brace of games you’d point to.

Sometimes I’d be jerked awake from some nightmare as I slept over the course of my nightly two hours, and I remember how I liked when these occasions overlapped with Mylnikov making some save on Gretzky or Lemieux. Never mind that his save percentage must have been like .886 or something like that during the series. He was hanging in there, battling. Making the best of a bad lot, that constant Team Canada attack. Sometimes you admire someone’s ability to endure more than someone else’s ability to dominate in more favorable circumstances.

Mylnikov didn’t even get the nod to play in all three games. He handled the first and the third. In essence, then, so far as the final outcomes went, he had a peak, and he had a trough. Evgeny Belosheikin was the goalie in the middle game. He battled alcoholism and killed himself in 1999. He was 33.

I want to say I don’t know why all of this got me thinking so much, but of course I do. As you walk that path between wanting to die and wanting to be okay again, your version of brothers and sisters, of those who belong to your particular fold, becomes those who would know — or who you thought might know — something of the pain you are in. It doesn’t really matter if they did or they didn’t — you look to them anyway. It is a form of what receptivity you have, until, and if, you become whole again. When Dan Kelly, he of the soothing voice, was on his death bed and his family wanted to check his receptivity, his son asked him who scored the OT winner of that first finals game, the lone one won by the Soviets, with Mynilkov experiencing what I imagine was the greatest joy of his career. “Semak,” Kelly said. Which, of course, was correct.

Image: Ice Hockey Wiki

Essays Sport
| 15 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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