AMONG THE REWARDS for signing up to The42′s membership scheme is access to Behind the Lines, our sportswriting podcast. Each episode features an in-depth chat with a top sportswriter, and along with a chat about their career and their better war stories, they bring along a few examples of their favourite pieces of sportswriting to discuss.
If you want to sign up, head over to members.the42.ie.
In the meantime, here are five of the pieces picked by our guests, along with the rationale for their being picked.
1. On a refrigerated, colorless Saturday morning in the no-McDonald’s town of Walnut, Ill., Kenny Wilcoxen walked along the street carrying the letter he had waited for his whole life, the one that meant that after 20 years he was finally going to ref the state high school football finals. On the other side of the letter, written neatly in blue ink, was his suicide note.
- When Your Dream Dies by Rick Reilly, Sports Illustrated 1994
Malachy Clerkin (Irish Times): I wanted something with a memorable intro. I remember this piece from a Rick Reily collection I bought years ago. This was amazing.
Who in the world is not reading on after that? It’s a novel in a paragraph. Everything from there on is in the context of those five lines. Plenty of people could be tipped off about this high school referee, and it would have been so easy just to inject it with melodrama. And at times he does: this was in the Christmas edition of Sports Illustrated and it does get a little mawkish in places. I just think that intro is just so brilliant.
2. From: Novak Djokovic <serbianwaterpolo@info-net.rs>
To: Roger Federer <rogerfederer1@me.com>
Date: September 8, 2014 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: :(
hey bud if youre feeling sad we can talk about this
From: Roger Federer <rogerfederer1@me.com>
To: Novak Djokovic <serbianwaterpolo@info-net.rs>
Date: September 8, 2014 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: :(
Hey hey hey, wait a second, Novak. I was worried you were feeling sad. Why would I be feeling sad? Personally, I’m very fortunate. Everywhere I go people tell me how much I mean to them, how much joy I’ve brought them. Everyone wants me to autograph their RF-insignia champagne flutes. The ink wipes right off the crystal, but they always ask me anyway. I’ve changed people’s lives, you know? What would I have to be sad about?
There’s the break. Marin is serving amazing out there. I’m happy for him. Just forget what I said before. I feel perfectly happy.
xRF
—
Roger Federer
“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.” —Bertrand Russell
- Dear Novak, Love Roger by Brian Phillips, Grantland 2014
Jonathan Liew (The Guardian): This isn’t even his best piece, but I picked it because it shows that these days, sportswriting can be whatever you want it to be. It doesn’t have to begin with a paragraph, followed by another paragraph, followed by another paragraph. It doesn’t even have to begin with a capital letter.
The way this piece bent the rules of what we consider sportswriting, I find that so fascinating.
3. New York always has a bad effect on Bobby. He goes back to it with dread and fascination, like a Jonah slipping back into his whale. Andrew Davis knew that this time he might easily get lost inside the whale and never make it to the plane. So he had prepared the kind of script they used to write for Mission: Impossible.
The plan was to abduct a man for his own good and do it so sneakily that the victim wouldn’t know what was happening to him. It was a job for a genie, but Davis didn’t happen to have one in his address book. So he asked Tony Saidy to take Bobby on a shopping trip and rounded up two friends and a professional chauffeur to help him. The friends knew Bobby but had not met Saidy. The chauffeur had never even heard of Bobby. And none of the five had ever abducted anything trickier than a cookie.
- The Day Bobby Blew It by Brad Darrach, Playboy 1973
Alan English (former Sunday Times Sports Editor): I chose this piece to acknowledge the phenomenal American tradition of great sportswriting. There was a joke that people bought Playboy to read the articles – you got value for money if you bought this 1973 edition. It’s a superlative piece, I love the pace of it.
The writer has been given extraordinary access to Fischer at that time. He brings it to life in the most fantastically vivid way.
4. I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about. To distract myself from this uneasy vigil–and from the phone that never rings, and from the icy rain that never stops pelting the window–I light a cigar and open a 40-year-old newspaper.
- Resurrecting the Champ by JR Moehringer, LA Times 1997
Glenn Stout (Series Editor of Best American Sportswriting Anthology): He set out to write one story, he encountered another story, and he didn’t try to force the first story onto the story he found.
He allowed himself to follow the story, to remain curious and to allow the story to develop organically. When that happens in a story, a certain intimacy is established. There is a discovery: too often stories are pushed into a pre-existing template, and there is a predictability to how they unfold.
I love the stories that unfold unpredictability, in which the writer follows what they find.
5. Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street. Somebody told them to put the body in another patrol car. Jim Moran’s patrol car was waiting. Moran is from the South Bronx, from Williams Ave., and he was brought up on Tony Bennett records in the jukeboxes. When he became a cop in 1964, he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel.
Girls screamed and pushed and Moran laughed. Once, it was all fun.Now responding to the call, “Man shot, 1 West 72,” Jim Moran, a 45-year-old policeman, pulled up in front of the Dakota and Tony Palma and Herb Frauenberger put this guy with blood all over him in the backseat. As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”
- The Day John Lennon Died by Jimmy Breslin, New York Daily News 1980
Michael Foley (Sunday Times): This isn’t a sports story but I’ll make a sports connection: Jimmy Breslin was a columnist for the New York Daily News. He specialised in talking with the downtrodden and writing stories which told a bigger truth. In this case, it was written the night John Lennon was killed in 1980.
This is a classic case of telling the story of a huge event by looking at something small; to tell the story of something big you look at something small.
He is telling the story by looking at the cops, who nobody else sees.
