Product Description

For fans of sports and just plain great writing, this collection of twenty-seven of the finest pieces from the past year features "outstanding sports reporting on a wealth of different topics" (Booklist). Guest editor Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of Moneyball and Coach, has assembled a compelling look at the sports stories and issues that dominated 2005. Pamela Colloff reports from the politically and sexually charged world of competitive cheerleading in Texas. Paul Solotaroff meets the star of the University of Georgia wrestling team, a nineteen-year-old world-record weightlifter who was born with no arms or legs. Ben Paynter travels the gay rodeo circuit. Pat Jordan profiles the world's greatest poker player, a boyish thirty-year-old whose mom still packs him a brown bag lunch. Jeff Duncan travels to Florida, where a New Orleans high school and its football program are picking up the pieces in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We also discover Linda Robertson reporting on the supersizing of NFL players. S. L. Price profiles the most famous U.S. Paraolympian. Katy Vine introduces a girl who can dunk -- in eighth grade -- and more. The pieces in this outstanding volume show the true reach and impact of sports, its importance often extending far beyond the playing field. As Lewis writes in his introduction, "What's reassuring about great sports writing is what's reassuring about great sports performances: facing opposition, and often against the odds, someone, at last, did something right."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #798195 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Booklist
It's time to rewrite George Plimpton's legendary observation on sports writing: the smaller the ball, the better the prose. How about this: the weirder the sport, the better the writing. Or so one might conclude after examining the latest edition of the always-satisfying Best American Sports Writing series. Guest editor Michael Lewis (author of Moneyball, 2003) brings together plenty of stories on mainstream sports, but the best of those look at the games from an angle beyond wins and losses (Linda Robertson's "XXL," for example, about the phenomenon of supersized NFL lineman). It's the oddballs, though, that really let the writers shine. Take Charlie Schroeder's "A (Fishing) Hole in One," about the off-the-grid "sport" of poaching fish from golf-course lakes. The jewel in this collection's crown, J. P. Moehringer's "The Unnatural Natural," profiles a sixtysomething St. Louis softball player ("the hobo Rob Hobbs") who is just this side of homeless. It isn't just the curiosity of the topic that elevates this story; it's Moehringer's refusal to pigeonhole his subject. That sense of the unexpected drives this thoroughly absorbing collection. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Glenn Stout has been the series editor of The Best American Sports Writing since its inception and has written three illustrated biographies with Richard A. Johnson: Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, Joe DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, and Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines. He is a columnist for Boston Baseball, and the acclaimed author of Red Sox Century, Yankees Century, and The Dodgers. His work has appeared in many regional and national magazines and newspapers.

MICHAEL LEWIS is the best-selling author of Moneyball, Coach, and Liars Poker, among other books. Moneyball was hailed as "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Slate) and "the best book of the year, already feels like the best book on sports ever written" (People).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction One of the strange things about people who write for a living is their tendency to dismiss the subjects most important to people who dont write for a living. Even as sports has taken up a position at the center of American life it remains peripheral to American literary life. The literary world treats books and articles about political events with utmost seriousness - even as a fantastically large number of Americans, to judge from their talent for avoiding the polls on election day, dont have the faintest idea what all the fuss is about. Books and articles about sports, and the ideas underpinning sports, remain on the bottom shelf, alongside the self-help books and celebrity memoirs. And yet sports is the one thing Americans can be relied upon to feel passionately about. There may be Americans glued to C-Span, but their numbers are overwhelmed by ESPNs addicts. There may be political leaders who inspire loyalty, but there arent any - so far as I know - who cause grown men and women to paint their faces and tattoo their chests and howl like werewolves. For every little boy or girl who wants to grow up to be a member of Congress there are, oh, about one million who intend to become major league baseball players or professional basketball players or ice skaters or gymnasts. Americans deadly seriousness about the games they play is probably not a good sign for their democracy, but it is unquestionably a sign. You cant govern what people care about. And what people care about is the writers path to their inner lives. The chance to help to rectify this imbalance between what people care about and what good writers write about has been one of the pleasures of being asked to make the final selections for this years edition of Best American Sports Writing. Here we dignify the work of writers who happen to have tackled material that is, in one way or another, related to sports. They wont be winning any literary prizes, but their work is important. They arent merely writing about sports. Theyre describing who we are. I should confess up front that this is a collection of stories with no very good theory to unify it. Ive just picked out the twenty-seven magazine and newspaper and Internet articles that I found the most interesting, of the seventy-five or so thrust upon me by the man who actually edited this volume, the shockingly diligent Glenn Stout. (Glenn apparently has read every article about sports ever written in America.) Several writers are represented here more than once: they are not blood relations of mine. So far as I know, Ive never met any of the writers whose work Ive selected. Literarily, the pieces dont have much in common with each other. Some are among the most finely written things on any topic; others are distinguished less by the quality of their prose than by the beauty of the story they tell. They range from elaborate narratives to simple opinion pieces, and they illustrate, among other things,