All writers have their own creation myth—or, as one of my nonfiction friends prefers, an “origination story,” the turning point where it all began, where the past became the past and the writing life took over, present tense, never to leave again.
Mine begins sometime in 1975. I had just turned 16 and was still in high school in a small town in central Ohio. Nearly every weekend I would borrow the Dodge Dart, and with maybe $10 in my pocket saved from what I earned cleaning bathrooms after school, I would travel from the cornrow-straight country road where I lived toward Columbus, a half-hour trip through the wealthier suburbs. The drive would take me by the Scioto Country Club, site of the 1926 U.S. Open, and past Nicklaus Drugs, where I wondered if Jack’s dad still filled prescriptions or if the Golden Bear himself sometimes dropped in for some Ben-Gay. As I neared High Street, the major north–south thoroughfare that skirted the campus of the Ohio State University, I would see, on the horizon, Ohio Stadium, OSU’s Horseshoe, once the largest poured-concrete structure in the world, brutal and cloudy gray as if covered with all the dust churned up from those three-yard plunges into the line. My mother worked at another nearby drugstore and had once waited on coach Woody Hayes and his wife. (She told me that he was impatient and not very nice, and that when he spoke he sounded like my grandmother.)
I’d turn right onto High Street, and then onto a side street. There, I’d find a place to park in front of one of the slowly decaying houses in that neighborhood, populated mostly by students basking in the last fading afterglow of the 1960s.
Whenever I got out of the car and walked up to High Street, along the few blocks of Columbus that ever so vaguely and briefly resembled what I imagined Haight-Ashbury to be, I was transformed. Wrapped in my jean jacket, wearing an army shirt and tattered jeans, with strands of hair getting longer leaking out beneath my cap, I was no longer just some kid who couldn’t wait for high school to be over and to leave home. For a few short hours I could be who and what I wanted.
And what I wanted to be was a writer. Little kid dreams of playing in the big leagues were fraying as quickly as my fastball and rotator cuff. A few years before, I had decided that I wanted to write, seizing on that most unlikely life raft because there were no others. In a few years I had ferreted out all the books that interested me at our tiny local town library and moved on to the larger and far better stocked library of that wealthy suburb. However, the kind of stuff I was interested in then—the Beats, the proletariat poetry of the 1930s, more recent experimental fiction, and the like—was in short supply. For a time it seemed as if every book on the shelf was either Erich Segal’s Love Story or The Little Prince, budget paperbacks that hung on every slot of the wire display stands near the circulation desk.
Most bookstores were little better. The chain store at the local mall featured perhaps two shelves of poetry, mostly either Rod McKuen, the blessedly almost-forgotten poet laureate of the obvious and vapid, or, as inexplicable now as it was then, copy after copy of Touch Me by Suzanne Somers, the blowsy blond actor not yet famous for appearing in the sitcom Three’s Company. Her work, impossible as it sounds, was far more treacly than McKuen’s and simultaneously almost blindingly, obliviously, and unintentionally surreal. Illustrated with gauzy portraiture, Touch Me featured Suzanne pondering a head of lettuce artfully placed before her chest, or wandering barefoot through fields, her skirt salaciously askew.
Although I enjoyed the pictures, I couldn’t really imagine that what I wanted to be had anything to do with these books. In fact, they sort of made me want to die.
Fortunately, there was another place. Up on High Street, tucked away in what had once been a residential building that also housed Bernie’s Bagels and Deli—which counted as ethnic food in Columbus back then—was a different kind of bookstore.
It was called My Back Pages, named after the Bob Dylan song. I had not heard much Dylan yet (although I titled my column in our high school newspaper “Idiot Wind”) but was already deep into a (still-active) Neil Young phase, and the sign outside—handmade and hand-painted, featuring the pages of an open book—was welcoming. And there were bagels.
Inside were some creaky wooden steps, a hallway plastered with political and psychedelic posters, piles of the Columbus Free Press stacked in a corner, and then a door wide open into what at some point must have been the living room of an apartment, or perhaps two rooms; I seem to recall a half wall somehow dividing the space, or maybe it was just the shelving. But I do know this: there were shelves and shelves and shelves of books.
They were mostly used books, interspersed with a few of what I would later learn were “small press” titles—chapbooks and self-published titles run off at some copy store, bound in construction paper, and numbered in an obscure corner (“6 of 25”).
The poetry section was huge, at least to me. Maybe six or eight shelves, a whole section of shelving or more, old textbooks and anthologies and books whose spines bore the names of poets I’d heard of but whose work I’d never read—or maybe I’d read one of their poems but now here was an entire book, or two or three or four, by that poet. There were university press titles and collections published by New Directions, Grove Press, and City Lights. There were more shelves marked for Eastern religion, nature and ecology, politics, revolution, and fiction, and more names of writers I knew but whose books I’d never found—John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac, not just On the Road, which I already had, but the other titles, long out of print, tattered, and hard to find: Tristessa, Big Sur, Vanity of Duluoz. In this bookstore there was no Love Story, no McKuen, no Somers. The combined impact was that of an egg cracking open to reveal another world.
But that was not the best part. I had been in a few such stores before, all of them bigger and messier and somehow intimidating. This bookstore was different.
Two guys, both hippies, worked behind the counter—I assumed they were co-owners. One was lithe and slender, with a wispy mustache and fine thin hair, while the other was larger, darker, fully bearded. I’m sure they noticed me right away. I was younger than most visitors, but this seemed not to matter.
I’d roam the small store for an hour, two hours, sometimes even three, picking up book after book, reading, then putting them back down, wondering how best to spend the $5 or so I had set aside for books, balancing volume (one or two or three thick titles) versus quantity (a half-dozen or so slimmer volumes).
Unlike the chain bookstores I sometimes visited, no one ever stalked me to make sure I wasn’t stealing or interrupted me with a chirpy “Can I help you?” that served the same purpose. Here, they left me mostly alone and only offered help in the gentlest, most unobtrusive way possible.
So for a few hours my fantasy was fueled. I felt like a writer there in the bookstore with my own kin. And when I finally went to the counter and counted out my change to buy what I’d decided on, the fantasy would be fulfilled. The two guys would comment on my purchases, ask me who else I liked and whether I’d ever read X, or what I thought of Y. Most exciting of all, they once asked, “Are you a writer?” Not if I wanted to be one, but if I was.
This might be the most important question a writer is ever asked—it certainly elicits the most important answer. To say yes is to know, to stake that claim and all the responsibility it entails.
The slender man with the wispy mustache was a poet, and the store featured several slender volumes of his self-published work. He was the first writer I ever met in the flesh, and look!—he wasn’t all that different from me. I imagined that he too grew up in some small town, or maybe in a tough part of a city, and had gravitated toward words just as I had, following an impulse buried deep in our ancestry, like salmon swimming upstream toward inevitable death, no matter what. One day as I was leaving he slipped his thin pamphlet—which probably sold for 50 cents—onto my stack, gratis, one writer to another.
I cannot recall a more important gift.
Armed with a bag of writing bona fides, and with the clock ticking toward 2:00 p.m., the time when I usually had to have the Dart back home, I’d go across the hall to the bagel shop, which would be quiet now after the morning rush. I’d take the rest of my money and order a toasted plain with cream cheese, slathered in strawberry jam—no lox yet for me—and then, lowering my voice, I’d order a beer. I was never carded, but also knew better than to order more than one. I imagined my restraint showed my sophistication.
I would nurse the beer for the next hour, till it was nearly flat, while I ate and skimmed and read and scratched out words in my notebook, imagining I was elsewhere—New York, San Francisco, hell, even Cleveland—as I completed the weekly pilgrimage by confirming with each word either read or written that I was a writer . . . I was a writer . . . I was a writer.
Then, buzzing slightly from the beer, or maybe only from the sound of that phrase, I’d drive back, past the golf course and gated homes with their neat stone fences, across the narrow metal bridge over the river, then down the twisting road that led toward the straight road home—a small ranch house, surrounded by corn and soybeans and barbed-wire fences, where the lawn was newly mown, clothes hung on the line, and Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek (who worked on his delivery in the off-season by reading poetry aloud) were welcoming viewers to the Game of the Week, just coming on. For the next week, despite all evidence that said otherwise as I negotiated the emotional bloodbath of high school, I knew exactly who I was. The next Saturday I would do it all again. I repeated this pattern, more or less, for years, in other places and in other ways, until finally one day it was true—I was a writer.
I think now of those two men at the bookstore and of what they meant to my younger self—to be seen and recognized and heard for what I imagined I was. When a young person contacts me today and thanks me for listening or paying attention, or says that The Best American Sports Writing has helped foster their love of words, I think of those long Saturdays at My Back Pages, now long gone but as real as ever, and of what really matters. I write back, or call, and I say, “Well, then, now you know the rule. And one day, when you have the chance, you’ll know just what to do.”
Each year I read every issue of hundreds of general interest and sports magazines in search of writing that might merit inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing. I also contact the editors of many newspapers and magazines and request submissions, and I make periodic open requests through Twitter and Facebook. I search for writing all over the Internet and make regular stops at online sources such as Gangrey, Longreads, Longform, TheSportsDesk, NiemanStoryboard, and other sites where notable sports writing is highlighted or discussed. And since this book belongs to the reader, I encourage everyone who cares—friends and family, readers and writers, editors and the edited—to send me stories they believe should appear in this series. Writers, in particular, are encouraged to do so—it’s okay to send your own work or the work of those you admire.
All submissions to the upcoming edition must be made according to the following criteria. Each story
must be column-length or longer.
must have been published in 2016.
must not be a reprint or a book excerpt.
must have been published in the United States or Canada.
must be received by February 1, 2017.
All submissions from either print or online publications must be made in hard copy and should include the name of the author, the date of publication, and the name and address of the publication. Photocopies, tear sheets, or clean copies are fine. Readable reductions to 8½-by-11 are preferred. Newspaper stories should be submitted as a hard copy or a copy of the same as originally published—not a printout of the web version.
I ask all individuals and publications to please use common sense when submitting multiple stories. Owing to the volume of material I receive, no submissions can be returned or acknowledged, and it is inappropriate for me to comment on or critique any submission. Magazines that want to be absolutely certain their contributions are considered are advised to provide a complimentary subscription to the address listed below. Those that already do so should extend the subscription for another year.
All submissions must be made by U.S. mail—even in the midst of global warming, midwinter weather conditions at BASW headquarters often prevent me from easily receiving UPS or FedEx submissions. Electronic submissions by any means—email, Twitter, URLs, PDFs, or electronic documents of any kind—are not acceptable; please submit only some form of hard copy. The February 1 deadline is real, and work received after that date cannot be considered. Please address all submissions to
Glenn Stout
PO Box 549
Alburgh, VT 05440
Previous editions of this book can be ordered through most bookstores or online book dealers. An index of stories that have appeared in this series can be found at glennstout.net, as can full instructions on how to submit a story. Those with questions or comments may contact me at basweditor@yahoo.com. For updated information, readers and writers are also encouraged to join the Best American Sports Writing group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter @GlennStout.
I played a role as editor of one selection this year, yet like all others, it was put forward to the guest editor blindly, not identified by source or author, and like all submissions in every edition of this series, it was chosen entirely on merit. My gratitude goes to guest editor Rick Telander, who took extraordinary care in making selections and who himself has long served as an example and mentor to other writers. I also thank all those at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who have helped with the production of this series, Siobhan and Saorla for putting up with the burdens that sometimes come with the words, and those writers who always seem to know what to do.
GLENN STOUT
Alburgh, Vermont