The Best American Sports Writing 2014

There's a certain style of writing particular to sports writing, a kind of press box journalism that stems from its origins in newspaper writing. Of course, newspapers are dying, but that tradition seems to have been carried out to other venues. Who else but a sportswriter could write a sentence like: "Don King no longer sits on boxing's throne, but he has nostalgia by the balls."

That's Jay Caspian King, in his piece on the declining years of boxing promoter Don King, "The End and Don King," one of the stronger pieces in The Best American Sports Writing 2014, edited by Christopher McDougall. There are a lot of great articles here, but as with last year's volume, these are all features--there's no pieces on actual on-the-field activities. I think that's a shame, but probably inevitable. It used to be you had to wait to until the morning paper to find out what happened in a game, now you can get it almost instantly on your phone.

There are also more than a few pieces that are about sports only in a tangential way. For example, Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey's piece on Manti Te'o's fake dead girlfriend, which is a great article but only about sports in that Te'o was a linebacker, when he just as well may have been a singer or a comedian. Also, there's a piece on a college football coach's false arrest on child pornography, or former Oakland Raider Anthony Jones' criminal endeavors--again, connected to sports only coincidentally.

The volume also challenges us on on what constitutes a sport. There's a fascinating article by Raffi Khatchadourian, "The Chaos of the Dice," about a backgammon champion. I think some of us would be hard-pressed to consider chess a sport, but backgammon? It's a fun article, though, as the number-one ranked player is a Runyonesque character called Falafel. "To the nongambler, the interior of an Atlantic City casino is in no way a place of obvious joy. For Falafel, who wanted to dabble in a few quick hands while he waited for The Bone, the atmosphere was energizing."

The only article about baseball is by Chris Jones, "When 772 Pitches Isn't Enough," which deals with the fundamental difference between the treatment of young arms in Japan and the U.S. In Japan, high school kids can throw their arms off, throwing close to a thousand pitches in a week-long tournament. It ties into the relative non-success of Japanese pitchers in the U.S., and if I were a GM, I wouldn't take the bait after reading this. It's especially poignant after Jon Smoltz's Hall of Fame speech, when he warned against the over-use of a young arm.

The pieces are arranged thematically, so we get two surfing stories in a row--Bucky McMahon's "Heart of Sharkness," about a nasty spree of shark attacks on surfers off of Reunion Island, and Alice Gregory's "Mavericks," about a spot south of San Francisco that can produce sixty-foot waves, and has killed more than a few of the best surfers in the world.

There are also some elegies on suicide victims--Jeremey Markovich's "Elegy of a Race Car Driver," about Dick Trickle, and Ian Frazier's "The Last Days of Stealhead Joe." Anything Frazier writes is worth reading, but this article about a fishing guide who took his own life is especially great. "Casting for steelhead is like calling God on the telephone and it rings and rings and rings hundreds of rings, a thousand rings, and you listen to each ring as if an answer might come at any moment, but no answer comes, and then on 1,001st ring, or the 1,047th ring, God loses his patience and picks up the phone and yells, 'WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING ME FOR?' in a voice the size of a canyon. You would fall to your knees if you weren't chest-deep in water and afraid that the rocketing leaping creature you have somehow tied into will get away."

There are three stories about tennis. Don Van Natta Jr.'s "The Match Maker" is about the legendary "Battle of the Sexes" in 1973, when Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs. I'm old enough to have saw that match, and the accompanying spectacle, live. I didn't know then, but a lot of people wondered, whether Riggs through the match. The article is inconclusive but intriguing. There are also two profiles of great women tennis players. One is on Li Na, from China, and another on Serena Williams, by Stephen Rodrick. "Who is most dominant figure in sports today? LeBron James? Michael Phelps? Please. Get that weak sauce of here. It is Serena Williams. She runs women's tennis like Kim-Jong Un runs North Korea: ruthlessly, with spare moments of comedy, indolence, and the occasional appearance of a split personality." William's recent string of victories in majors, since this article was published, only confirms Rodrick's argument.

Finally, I have to mention an amusing but factual article by Amanda Hess, "You Can Only Hope to Contain Them." What are "them?" Why, women's breasts, of course. She writes about whether large breasts may be an encumbrance on women's athletic endeavors--certainly they are for gymnasts, who starve themselves as teens to delay their growth. I'll let fighter Ronda Rousey have the last word: "You don't see big titties in the Olympics, and there's a reason."