The Year's Best Sports Writing 2021 Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  Walk, Run or Wheelbarrow

  Allison Glock from espnW

  What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe

  Kim Cross From Bicycling

  Pre-Game Interview

  Jay Martel From The New Yorker

  The Ramshackle Garden of Affection

  Ross Gay and Noah Davis From The Sun

  The Inheritance of Archie Manning

  Wright Thompson From ESPN

  “There Might Be a Family Secret”

  Jayson Stark From The Athletic

  This Woman Surfed the Biggest Wave of the Year

  Maggie Mertens From The Atlantic

  Hook Shot Charlie Is Spreading Hope Throughout Charlotte. If You Want Some of It, Just Try The Hook

  Michael Graff From Axios Charlotte

  The Most Magical Place on Earth

  Taylor Rooks From GQ

  Is College Football Making the Pandemic Worse?

  Louisa Thomas From The New Yorker

  The Confederate Flag Is Finally Gone at NASCAR Races, and I Won’t Miss It for a Second

  Ryan McGee From ESPN

  Twelve Minutes and a Life

  Mitchell S. Jackson From Runner’s World

  Kobe Always Showed His Work. So We Have to in Remembering Him, Too

  Brian Phillips From The Ringer

  How Kobe Bryant’s Death Brought Bobby McIlvaine—an Athlete, a Scholar, the Friend I Should’ve Known Better—Back to Life

  Mike Sielski From The Philadelphia Inquirer

  Andrew Giuliani, Official Sports Guy of the White House, Sees a Score in Big Ten’s Return

  Kent Babb From The Washington Post

  Baseball’s Fight to Reclaim Its Soul

  Tom Verducci From Sports Illustrated

  Inside the Rise of MLB’s Ivy League Culture: Stunning Numbers and a Question of What’s Next

  Joon Lee From ESPN

  Shades of Grey

  Ashley Stimpson From Longreads

  A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack

  Nicholas Thompson From WIRED

  The Master Thief

  Zeke Faux From Bloomberg Businessweek

  The Bout

  Cary Clack From Truly*Adventurous

  The Bubble of a Dream

  Peter Bromka From Medium

  Out There: On Not Finishing

  Devin Kelly From Longreads

  Fifty Years After Its Unfathomable Loss, Marshall Spends Another Nov. 14 with Pain and Memories

  Chuck Culpepper From The Washington Post

  Their Son’s Heart Saved His Life. So He Rode 1,426 Miles to Meet Them

  A.C. Shilton From Bicycling

  Advisory Board

  Notable Sports Writing of 2020

  Introduction

  No one saw this coming.

  It seems as if every time we think we’ve seen it all in the arena of sports there is always a surprise, but I don’t think anything quite prepared us for the events of 2020.

  As I write this we are barely a year removed since the word COVID entered our common lexicon. I remember thinking, upon first hearing of the emerging pandemic, that “this could be bad.” How bad? I recall telling someone “it will be June or July till things get back to normal.”

  I was only off by about a year, more or less.

  It was no accident that sports played a role in first underscoring the scope of the pandemic, first represented by the NBA’s Rudy Gobert’s unfortunate mocking of the severity of the virus on March 9 when he famously made sure to touch all the microphones at a press conference only to come down with the virus himself a few days later. Soon, the NBA and nearly every other sports league suspended operations.

  Entirely by accident, it was because sports are so ubiquitous in our society that it was through sports that most Americans and Canadians became aware of the severity and potential danger that COVID posed. The result, as we now recognize, was that virtually all sports activities of any kind took place for the remainder of the calendar year and beyond—when they took place at all—under the specter of the virus.

  But that’s not all that happened.

  In what, by any measure, is certainly the most unique year in the history of sports this century, if not the last one as well, COVID disrupted almost everything. We also had to confront a long overdue racial reckoning, a recession, and civil unrest in a toxic political climate. Tragedies like the death of Kobe Bryant were swept away and recent championship celebrations almost forgotten. At a time when some expected sports, as it continued, albeit haltingly, to provide a kind of escape from grimmer realities, that really didn’t happen. In a sense, perhaps never before has sports—at least the commercialized, institutionalized, athlete-as-commodity kind of sports—seemed to matter so little. Compared to the time before COVID, fans and athletes alike were forced to reconsider their relationship to the games.

  It just didn’t feel or look the same without fans in the stands, with seasons cancelled, suspended and then resumed, NFL games played mid-week, and a host of other disruptions. Far from being an escape or respite from reality, in many ways sports made reality more present. For every fan that turned to the games for solace, others turned away, finding the intrusion of reality too uncomfortable to bear. Super Bowl ratings were the lowest since 1969. Ratings for the 2020 NBA playoffs were down 37% compared to 2019; the NHL (38%), MLB (40%), and college football (30%) suffered similar drops. ESPN even began airing cornhole competitions, cherry-pit spitting, and lawn mower racing, the kind of “sports” the network would have never considered even in its nascent days.

  Professional and most other institutionalized sports, in just about every way possible, played truncated schedules and operated in ways that, in the future, will result in very large asterisks placed next to every champion. Who, really, was the best at anything in 2020? We’ll never really know.

  Writers, or course, were no less affected. Those who covered sports for a living found themselves watching video feeds or sequestered in the nether regions of arenas and ballparks, with access to the athletes themselves, with few exceptions, nearly non-existent. Print publications and digital outlets pared back considerably if they managed to stay in business at all. The freelance market dried up almost entirely (even, if we’re playing the ratings game, as book buying increased by 8%). Those of us who imagined that their careers had reached a place of stability were reminded, yet again, that the only constant is change. All of us, in ways large and small, were forced to adapt.

  Fortunately, however, sports have never been the sole province of the leagues, associations, and their related acronyms. Those have never been more than the bottom of a very big funnel that shuffles and sorts and spits out athletes and sports for our mass consumption. Yet sports itself, the actual games and competition that pit one human being tested against another, or even against themselves, still took place. The venues may have been less visible, even so personal as to be solitary, but it is there that the value of sports during such a time was revealed. Maybe the myopic focus only on wins and losses, on beating the other guy, finally began to run its course, and some of the older, more essential but recently considered less valuable traits of sports began to re-emerge. The mere act of survival, of perseverance, or somehow still managing to join with others in any kind of shared activity suddenly seemed important again. I didn’t miss playing baseball or watching it nearly as much as I did not being able to play catch. And if basketball didn’t take place in an arena before thousands of fans, there remained, somewhere and someplace, a ball being dribbled and bounced off a backboard and games of “HORSE” played on opposite ends of the court, even if no one was watching. And to those who indulged in lone pursuits, finding competition only with the imagination, sports continued to play an essential role and helped us go on.

  I think in this, the strangest of seasons, we can give some credit to the writers for showing how sports continued, and what roles it survived to play. While some writers struggled to provide content, throw-away filler as fungible as the age, the situation pushed others to reach elsewhere, into the more hidden places of our hearts where we find value in what we do. I’ve long argued that despite the various strains and struggle writers may face in a business that, in many ways, makes no sense, that despite all the obstacles placed in their way, they nonetheless continue to produce work that is vital, proving their value again and again.

  This book is evidence of that, and 2020 was no exception. As the prospects for this volume began to take shape, others may have wondered what would become of sports writing during this time and whether it would even be worthwhile to put together such a collection—I never did. I knew that despite everything—in fact, because of everything, that the writers that aspire to write about sports and perhaps appear in a book such as this would meet the challenge. They would penetrate our uncertainty and ambiguity and somehow translate our collective anxieties and fears to locate that solid center that still remained, the core that makes us all still care.

  Perhaps that’s what this past season revealed. As I read through the thousands of stories that were considered for this volume, those I found myself and those that were recommended to me, something tr
ue and lasting seemed to surface. Whether a given story was overtly COVID-centric or not, it became clear to me that although we might not always give a damn about the games—and in the long run that may not even matter—we sure as hell do care about each other. That’s what the best writing can do, by words alone uncover what no other medium can do in quite the same way, and reveal what really matters. That’s also something readers cherish and desire. That they still looked forward to a book such as this provides some proof that this is so.

  I’m a firm believer that the value of writing comes from the degree it enables us to know each other, and if there is a thread that unites most of the stories in this collection, it is precisely that. Writing about sports occupies a special place in our culture, because sports are one of those few subjects we share an interest in with almost everyone, a topic that can inspire communication between strangers. Standing in line somewhere or sitting in a bar—even socially distanced—you can turn to a stranger and make a comment about a game or a player and usually get a reaction. You start to speak to one another and before long find yourself sharing memories and opinions and observations, the stories that make up our lives. The instant that happens the gap between us begins to narrow. The stranger is not so strange, even if we might disagree, and even if he or she might be wearing a hat or a T-shirt that might cause us to blanch. The sharing of words and stories brings us closer to each other and makes the world a less lonely and less frightening place, even if you love the Red Sox and I cheer myself hoarse for the Yankees, I bleed Maize and Blue and you go gaga over Scarlet and Gray, I say Kobe and you say LeBron, and then the next person weighs in and mentions Dr. J and MJ. The moment we tell and share stories, we begin to know each other and begin to understand, however narrowly, there may be a place where we overlap and stand on the same side.

  None of this is to say this collection is entirely pandemic-centric. It’s not. Sports took place before we knew Brooklyn’s Dr. Fauci ever played point guard for Regis High School, and even after we all joined team COVID. This book continues a long tradition that began when the Best Sports Stories series was first published in 1945, and continued (with one exception due to the illness of its editor) until 1990. Then, in a fortunate coincidence, the venerable Best American Sports Writing series began its 30-year run, taking its place on the shelf each year for a longer period of time than Nolan Ryan took the mound, but not quite as long as Gordie Howe laced on the skates.

  Year after year the dedicated readers of each volume of those two collections made the case for the necessity of their existence. Neither book ever “stuck to sports,” for the moment we give more than the final score, we’re not sticking with sports but placing sports in the context of our larger world, a world not defined by statistics but by people who live and breathe and love and die. Sports are just another place where humanity, at its best, its worst, and all places in between, is on display. In that confined space it is perhaps a little easier to see each other a bit more clearly than to try to comprehend the world in its entirety.

  So we begin again, and go on from here.

  * * *

  This book represents both the old tradition of those previous two series, but also a fresh start. While this series may resemble those that came before, it is not quite the same. I was honored, after the demise of The Best American Sports Writing, when hundreds of readers lamented its passing, and grateful when Triumph Books approached me and asked if I had any thoughts as to how another collection might take root. I did, and over the course of a number of months shared my ideas as to how that might look.

  Over the final years of The Best American Sports Writing, as my name became familiar as the only constant over its 30-year lifespan, many made the understandable assumption that it was in some way “my” book. I never did and it never was. In my role as series editor I never selected a single story for inclusion, yet the perception gained traction. That is why the first recommendation I made in regard to The Year’s Best Sports Writing was that there would be no “Glenn Stout” at the helm feeding stories to a guest editor. While he or she was always free to select any story they wish, admittedly some took that responsibility more seriously than others.

  In this new collection, the annual editor, which the publisher will select, will change each year. He or she will again have the responsibility of making the final selections, but our expectation is that the annual editor will take a much more active role in making the annual selections. Instead of a “series editor” to provide assistance with that daunting task and ensure that the editor sees as wide a range of material as possible, an eight-member advisory board will be on the lookout for stories over the course of the year, just as we expect the annual editor to do. The makeup of the board, as the reader can see from those in this inaugural edition, is designed to represent the full scope of this industry: freelancers and staffers of every age and background, male and female, people with experience in newspapers and magazines and digital publications, both those who cover sports exclusively and those who do so only occasionally. This year I made the selection of the advisory board, choosing writers I trusted and respected, some that I knew quite well and some I knew hardly at all. Collectively, the board will help ensure the annual editor sees stories of all kinds, from as many places and perspectives as possible, because the “best” can come from anywhere. They did a terrific job of not only alerting me to stories I had missed, but it was also illuminating to see those stories that multiple members of the board put forward. This was particularly helpful in the selection of the story by Kim Cross that appears in this collection. Although works by board members are eligible to appear in the book, none of us wanted any such selection to appear to be the product of any favoritism. Suffice to say that Kim’s story was not only cited by a number of aggregators as one of the best stories of the year but was also independently submitted by a majority of the board members.

  This year’s book was a bit of a challenge for all of us, for until publication was certain we could not recruit members to the board. Nevertheless they took their task seriously and mined their memory banks—and those of their colleagues—for work that appeared over the entire course of the year. Knowing that this book might happen since last spring, although I was unable to solicit submissions I took a flyer and nevertheless paid close attention, setting stories aside in the event this book was published according to the same criteria I always have: searching for stories that reading once, I wanted to read again and share with friends. Although it was impossible this year, in the future we may well have a mechanism by which writers and outlets can again nominate their own work.

  In many ways serving as the first annual editor of The Year’s Best Sports Writing also marks the end of my role in this series. Over the next few years my role will diminish and become primarily custodial, then dwindle to nothing. That’s my choice, for as I said, just as The Best American Sports Writing was not “my” book, neither is this, and I’ve occupied this space long enough. It’s time for others to take over. Each year another writer will serve as annual editor and write the introduction. My major role is only to plant a new seed in the ground and work the soil for a couple of years to give it a chance to grow on its own. As ever, the book really belongs to the writers that aspire to appear in its pages and the readers who look forward to such a collection each year, and my thanks first goes out to each and every one of them. I’d also like to thank everyone at Triumph Books who believed in this project, colleague Bill Ruthi, the members of the advisory board—Ben Baby, Alex Belth, Howard Bryant, Kim Cross, Roberto José Andrade Franco, Latria Graham, Michael Mooney, and Linda Robertson—and Siobhan and Saorla for putting up with the work of a book such as this for one more year.

  Serving as the first annual editor does satisfy a long desire, one that I now must admit was much more difficult than I believed it would be. Making the final selections is much tougher than simply making suggestions, and the circumstances of this year made that much tougher still. I wish all those who follow the very best.

  By then, I’ll be settling into the same role that set me on this unlikely path more than 50 years ago, when the full shelf of Best Sports Stories in my small town library helped sparked a lifelong interest in writing. I’ll just be turning the pages as a reader again, settling in each year to read a volume that we hope proves to be as entertaining, inspirational, and essential as those of the past.