The Year's Best Sports Writing 2022 Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Kentucky Derby of My Childhood Was a Fantasy. Now It Feels Raw, and Real

  JERRY BREWER From The Washington Post

  Stephen Curry Is Not the MVP—He’s Something Much More

  MARCUS THOMPSON II From The Athletic

  Badwater Ultramarathon: What I Lost and Found During 135 Miles of the World’s Most Impossible Run

  KELAINE CONOCHAN From ESPN

  I Flew to Texas to Watch Bull Riding on an Aircraft Carrier During COVID

  MATT CROSSMAN From Experience

  Simone Biles Chose Herself

  CAMONGHNE FELIX From The Cut

  The Depths She’ll Reach

  XAN RICE From Long Lead

  Let Us Appreciate the Grace and Uncommon Decency of Henry Aaron

  HOWARD BRYANT From ESPN

  Felipe Ruiz Took the Ride of His Life Working as Tommy Lasorda’s Assistant

  BILL PLASCHKE From the Los Angeles Times

  Living Nonbinary in a Binary Sports World

  Frankie DE LA CRETAZ From Sports Illustrated

  Say You Wandered into Kansas vs. Texas Not Long After Halftime. Man, Did You Luck Out.

  CHUCK CULPEPPER From The Washington Post

  Super League Rage, Ronaldo Mania and the Fight for the Soul of Manchester United

  WRIGHT THOMPSON From ESPN

  ‘Got Back to My Roots’: Nia Dennis and the Groundbreaking Genius of #BlackExcellence

  THUC NHI NGUYEN From the Los Angeles Times

  Paspalum Shadows

  ANDREW LAWRENCE From The Golfer’s Journal

  Rosalie Fish Wants to Be the Face of Change

  MIRIN FADER From The Ringer

  Courtney’s Story

  DIANA MOSKOVITZ From Defector

  What It Was Like to Watch Naomi Osaka Up Close During Her Vexing 2021 US Open9

  KEVIN VAN VALKENBURG From ESPN

  Beneath 9/11’s Terrible Smoke, a Flash of Gold

  SALLY JENKINS From The Washington Post

  ‘Things Are Going to Be Different Now’

  SHAKER SAMMAN From Sports Illustrated

  In Mavericks’ Dream Surf Season, 51-Year-Old Peter Mel Making Big-Wave History

  BRUCE JENKINS From the San Francisco Chronicle

  Canelo Álvarez and the Mystical Man Behind His Quest for Immortality

  ROBERTO JOSÉ ANDRADE FRANCO From ESPN

  The Luckiest Two Women in the WNBA

  MIKE PIELLUCCI From D Magazine

  How a Gymnast Who Lost a Friend in the Parkland Mass School Shooting Came to Iowa and Found Ways to Heal

  MARK EMMERT From The Des Moines Register and Iowa City Press-Citizen

  Charlotte’s First and Forgotten Sports Star: Life, Death and His Season in the Sun

  SCOTT Fowler From the Charlotte Observer

  The Resurgent Appeal of Guinness World Records

  TOVE K. DANOVICH From The Ringer

  Can a Boxer Return to the Ring After Killing?

  JACOB STERN From The Atlantic

  I’ve Covered Nine Olympics. Nothing Prepared Me for Seeing My Daughter Win a Medal

  PAT FORDE From Sports Illustrated

  ‘His Name Is Sang. He Is a Pitcher.’ A Family’s American Dream, Their Unbearable Loss

  STEPHEN J. NESBITT From The Athletic

  Why Giannis Antetokounmpo Chose the Path of Most Resistance

  ZACH BARON From GQ

  Advisory Board

  Notable Sports Writing of 2021

  Introduction

  You’re about to discover why this collection of stories you’re holding that celebrates the art of sports writing is so different from “The Art of Sportswriting.”

  “The Art of Sportswriting” (one word, more on that distinction later) was the cover story in the May/June 1987 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, which sat on my nightstand throughout my last year of high school. I read and re-read the article countless times while I was a student, seeking inspiration for the career I already knew I wanted to pursue. In September of 2021, during one of my periodic purging and condensing of the old newspapers, magazines, and game programs in my garage, I came across the “The Art of Sportswriting” issue again. When I read it once more, three and a half decades later, I realized the article had led me astray all along.

  “The best part of sportswriting is still a reporter at the game telling us what happened,” was its key line, the one that was put in boldface in a pull quote, the one that proved so, so wrong. For one thing, it violated the three-word maxim pounded into journalism students’ brains by professors everywhere: Show, don’t tell. And journalists should not tell what happened, they should explain what happened. Explain why it matters and why we should care.

  That’s what Marcus Thompson II did after Stephen Curry launched into suborbital flight in April of 2021. Curry averaged 37 points for the month, with four games with at least 10 three-pointers and five games with at least 40 points, but Thompson didn’t fall into the trap of engaging in a Most Valuable Player debate. He recognized that this was something far beyond that, the type of play that might not be officially commemorated but will be historically referenced, cited by those in the know.

  Thompson’s story was the first that popped into my head after I was asked to edit the 2022 edition of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. His story, entitled “Stephen Curry Is Not the MVP—He’s Something Much More,” is sports writing in its classical form. The rest of the selections that fill out the book represent what sports writing has become: a peek into the psyche of high achievers, a celebration of accomplishments and an examination of failures, a study of how people interact, and a discussion of societal progress and lingering inequities. In other words, all of the things “The Art of Sportswriting” story feared would happen to the profession. Yes, feared. It called the proliferation of feature stories a “danger.” And the next-to-last paragraph contained this admonition: “Sportswriters seem to forget that the game is more important than the people who play it.”

  When I read that as a teenager I didn’t dare challenge it. Now, after 15 years of working at major newspapers and a decade at ESPN, I feel confident enough to reset the order: People, then the games.

  If you’ve read any of the previous incarnations of series editor Glenn Stout’s annual best sports writing collections, you’ve seen very few game recaps. And that’s not the only rebuke of the main premise of “The Art of Sportswriting.” You’ll notice the books spell sports writing with two words, not one.

  “That was the first decision made when the series was created,” Stout explained in an email. “Sports writing … writing about sports—is a less narrow definition than ‘sportswriting’ per se, which most readers think of as what you find on the sports page. It allowed the book to consider and include a wider variety of writing.”

  Amazing how much liberty can be gained simply by inserting a space into a word. Ironically, the main way I employed the freedom and wide range of options that were given to me when I was presented the opportunity to edit this year’s book…was to find ways to shrink the eligibility parameters. That was the only way to cut the vast array of quality articles to a manageable number.

  I received hundreds of submissions from writers and their colleagues after I announced my guest editing role on Twitter. I also sought suggestions from Stout and a panel that consisted of: Paola Boivin, director of the Cronkite News Phoenix Sports Bureau at Arizona State University; Richard Deitsch, media reporter at The Athletic; Greg Lee, senior assistant managing editor at the Boston Globe; and Iliana Limón Romero, deputy sports editor of the Los Angeles Times. I’m grateful to them for bringing attention to stories I might otherwise have missed and for making clear which stories I had to include, by consensus.

  Each of their lists looked vastly different. That was the point of including them in the process. It also reinforced the difficulty and subjectivity of this assignment. It meant I had to arrive at my own definition of the best part of sports writing.

  My first step was to separate sports writing from sports journalism. As impressive and important as, say the reporting by The Athletic on sexual misconduct in the NWSL or by The Washington Post on the toxic workplace environment for the local NFL team, it wasn’t the writing that made them stand out. They were significant because they uncovered secrets and brought some leveling to the power imbalance. They weren’t examples of great sports journalism, they were examples of great journalism. Period. But they weren’t what I was looking for.

  I was looking for stories that felt important specifically because of their writing, writing that grabbed your attention right away and never relinquished it, writing that took you on a journey.

  I decided this collection would consist of stories that were focused on sports in a way specifically related to 2021, not merely stories that had a connection to sports that were written in 2021. That meant stories about current athletes, not former athletes. Stories about the central figures, not people on the periphery, such as fans or media members. (If that makes you question the inclusion of Bill Plaschke’s column on Felipe Ruiz, Tommy Lasorda’s trusted assistant in the last years of Lasorda’s life, the Los Angeles native in me has a counter-argument: You won’t find a greater feat of endura
nce in the entire book than the day Ruiz drove Lasorda from his home in Fullerton to his office at Dodger Stadium to a lunch appearance in Manhattan Beach to dinner in Ontario and finally back to Fullerton at 2:30 a.m.).

  And why did a story about the ex-wife of an assistant football coach fit my definition? Because the mounting evidence that Urban Meyer was unfit to be the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars became one of the biggest sports stories of 2021, and Exhibit A should have been Courtney Smith’s claims that Meyer failed to properly act on her allegations that her husband, an assistant on Meyer’s staff at Ohio State, had abused her. Just because the images of Meyer with a woman at a restaurant that spread on social media seemed to have a bigger impact on Meyer’s downfall doesn’t mean we should not recognize the importance of “Courtney’s Story” by Diana Moscovitz—and the way Moscovitz’s word usage made the story so memorable.

  Some of these stories made it because they struck a personal chord. I doubt Bruce Jenkins’ tale of a 51-year-old big-wave surfer would have resonated with me as much had I not turned 51 myself in 2021. And Tove K. Danovich’s “The Resurgent Appeal of Guinness World Records” took me back to a 1977 cross-country drive with my parents, when a paperback copy of The Guinness Book of World Records was my sole means of entertainment. Also, Danovich’s story featured my favorite sports figure of 2021: Zaila Avant-garde, the delightful teenager who won the 2021 Scripps National Spelling Bee, set a record for bounce-juggling four basketballs 255 times in a minute, and scored bucket after bucket in YouTube footage of her high school basketball games.

  There’s one more flaw in the “The Art of Sportswriting” that needed updating and correcting: every sports writer mentioned in that article, both canonical and contemporary, was a white man. Every. Single. One. It’s as if pioneering Black writers such as Sam Lacy, Wendell Smith, Larry Whiteside, and Ralph Wiley, or barrier-breaking women such as Melissa Ludtke, Lesley Visser, Helene Elliott, Christine Brennan, and Claire Smith, did not exist.

  I sought diversity in race, gender, sexual identity, and faith among the writers and their subjects for the 2022 edition of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. That’s one reason for the higher-than-usual number of stories this year; sometimes inclusion requires expansion.

  The only two subjects that felt mandatory were Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka, two athletes who in recent years have epitomized competitive greatness, the way we discuss mental health, and the way we analyze sports in the hyper-intense social media era. I chose two examples that told their stories in very different ways. Camonghne Felix got Biles to open up in what amounted to a debriefing of her drama-filled 2021, from the stress-induced pullout from the Olympics gymnastics competition in Tokyo to her Capitol Hill testimony about the ways the sports and law enforcement institutions failed to properly respond to the sexual abuse of Larry Nassar. Meanwhile, Kevin Van Valkenburg took the opposite approach to Osaka: he interpreted her actions, not her words.

  When Osaka announced her desire to avoid post-match news conferences because they exacerbated her depression, it triggered an existential crisis among sports journalists who were already reeling from the access restrictions instituted in the COVID-19 pandemic. What will we do if we can’t talk to them? Van Valkenburg’s story suggests the answer is to pay more attention when we watch them. He searched for the meaning and significance in everything from the way she shifts her weight to the way she blows on her fingers.

  It just hit me that, perhaps subconsciously, I wanted this book to showcase not only what was written but how it was written. I want it to celebrate and educate. Guess it’s only fitting—right?—given my current role as the director of sports journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communication. This book should provide teaching material.

  It’s a snapshot of sports writing in the past year, but it’s also a continuum of the great sports writing that has existed for decades.

  In “Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff,” famed sports writer Red Smith’s account of The Shot Heard Round the World that decided the 1951 National League pennant, Smith never explicitly describes the most historical events of the day. Smith wrote about a drunken fan running onto the field amid the jubilation after the game. Smith wrote the dialog he imagined took place when Bobby Thomson and teammate Whitey Lockman found themselves both standing on second base earlier in the game. He noted that the losing pitcher, Ralph Branca, wore No. 13.

  But nowhere in the story does Smith say that Bobby Thomson hit a home run to left field in the bottom of the ninth inning and the Giants beat the Dodgers, 5–4. In one of the most famous stories by one of the genre’s most revered figures, the reporter at the game did not tell us what happened—specifically, the one thing that supposedly mattered the most.

  Sports writing is not the first rough draft of history. It’s something much more.

  J.A. Adande

  Chicago

  Fall 2022

  The Kentucky Derby of My Childhood Was a Fantasy. Now It Feels Raw, and Real

  JERRY BREWER

  From The Washington Post • May 1, 2021

  Nostalgia puts me back at my grandparents’ house in Louisville. It is about 1990, the first Saturday in May, and we are visiting for another Kentucky Derby party. I am 12 and wonder-struck, as usual.

  It smells like barbecue and sounds like church folk letting loose, playful and loud and skirting the line of inappropriate speech. It looks polychromatic and fancy, so fancy for a house soiree, an assortment of bright clothing that seems exotic but comfortable, stylish but not too formal. It feels right, unless I’m remembering it wrong.

  The Derby, still my darling sporting event, doesn’t conjure the same emotions right now. Both of my grandparents died in November. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t been back to Louisville since February 2020, and I have no concrete plans to visit soon. Because my parents moved, I haven’t seen my hometown of Paducah, which is about 220 miles southwest of Louisville, in almost a decade. And in the aftermath of the Breonna Taylor killing, home is full of disappointment, conflict and shame.

  Yet on Saturday, my mind will go where my displaced body cannot: to Churchill Downs for the 147th Run for the Roses. I might get misty-eyed when the bugler plays “My Old Kentucky Home,” and I might whisper a few of the lyrics, even though Stephen Foster’s song is more honest if interpreted as a wrenching tale of enslavement and not a wistful state song.

  In grief and anger, some of my oldest memories have been altered. It’s a crazy mental phenomenon, the fluidity of remembering, how feelings attach themselves to facts and perceptions of experiences differ, not just from person to person but within us at various stages of life. The Derby is still a love, but it’s not an active romance. Kentucky is still home, still worthy of pride and vehement defense when warranted. But it is not the place for me as an adult, not now and probably not ever again.

  For the first time, the annual event is about far more than romanticizing my childhood. The Derby is not the fantasy I once imagined. In a single year—the longest year—it has evolved into a magnet for tension, something that my grief and anger can manipulate with unexpected ease. And then there’s this peculiar addendum: Somehow, those competing, unresolved emotions feel like a pathway to a richer and more worthwhile experience.

  In Light in August, William Faulkner wrote: “Memory believes before knowing remembers.” The words make sense now. They are personal now. As Kentuckians, we are grandfathered into loving the Derby. We may not even like horse racing, and the event is so grand that it can feel suffocating, but we enjoy being showcased, dressed up, important. We like hosting and leaning into a kindness that belies some of the state’s toxic history. The Derby is not ours, but it is ours. We treat it like family and connect the warmest memories to it.

  However, upon sincere reassessment, it’s messy, complicated and tinged with racism. It unifies, and it agitates. To see that clearly, it took the pandemic shifting last year’s race to September and hordes of people protesting the commonwealth’s cavalier pursuit of police accountability and justice after Taylor’s death. In this light, there are new memories to balance the past canonization, and there is history to know—or remember—coldly.