Introduction

When I think about writing, I become almost hallucinatory.

My thoughts shoot off in every direction like shrapnel from an exploding cherry bomb. (I had a lot of those as a kid, BTW—Silver Salutes, and M-80s too. I got them on summer trips to southern Georgia, where my grandparents lived on Jekyll Island, about 30 miles north of the Florida border, a crossing to which my sweet grandmother, Nonnie, would take me in her big black Cadillac, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls all the way, when I begged her to take me and my parents were off somewhere else, and I’d walk alone into a place called Krazy Ken’s or Daffy Dick’s or something like that and offer up several weeks of allowance and lawn-mowing money to a disinterested, criminal-looking clerk behind the counter for the treasured cube-shaped boxes of firecrackers—each holding a gross of what was essentially weapons-grade near-dynamite.)

But when I collect myself I realize it’s all too true: I am wedded to the printed word the way a turtle (had a lot of those as a kid too) is to its shell. My life, basically, has been dedicated to the printed word, to the reading and writing of it, for better or for worse.

I don’t think I amount to much without writing, whether the doing of it or the thinking about it. Or at least, my life has little meaning—to me, at this point—without writing at its core. Sometimes I wonder what I would have been if not a writer—a sportswriter, to be precise. I really don’t know. Maybe a carpenter, a builder of some kind. (I like the smell of cut wood and the sound of hammers on nails.) An architect? (My mom always says she thought that’s what I’d be, because I drew stuff all the time with rulers and compasses and built balsa wood cages for my pet crickets and toads and the like.) Maybe a lawyer? Don’t think so. A businessman? Possibly. No. A coach? No. A teacher? Of what? I’m guessing other writers have asked themselves the same question and come up with the same clueless responses.

The printed word sings to me the way a palette of paints sings to an artist, numbers to a mathematician, notes in harmony to a musician. My middle daughter, Cary, had a school friend who practiced the cello for hours each day, not out of duty or obedience—though she was a virtuoso and needed to practice to maintain her virtuosity—but because the vibrating strings and their tonal resonance within the curved walls of the precision-built wooden instrument soothed her in a way that was primitive, fundamental, and nearly obsessional.

I’m not a person who can’t wait to sit down at the laptop, who claps his hands together as he looks at that hinged slab of techno crap every morning, come hell or high water, and says, “Whoopee, here we go, baby! I’m a-writin’!” I’ve met those kinds of people and I don’t understand them. Or they don’t understand themselves. Or they don’t understand me. Or something.

Writing isn’t fun. (And that should be said to oneself the way Tom Hanks, in A League of Their Own, says, after looking incredulously at his star pitcher: “There’s no crying in baseball.”) But for those of us who see words as our way of release and expression and freedom, writing is necessary. You always scratch where it itches, and the itch never goes away. What is it? I don’t know. It’s there, though. The itch to communicate through symbols of thought, perhaps.

Let me note that unfocused blabbering and venting in print can be fun, the same way pounding on a guitar and screaming stuff into a microphone can be fun. (I do that sometimes too, with my band of 45 years, the Del-Crustaceans.) But writing words that state precisely what you want them to state, something that is meaningful, intelligent, well conceived, and important, in a clear, true, and entertaining style, writing something that people will want to read—that is hard. And since when is hard fun? Hard is the opposite of easy. And easy lives next door to lazy. And lazy is not worth talking about. But hard, when done right, leads to something beyond worthwhile, beyond fun—it leads to fulfillment.

Writing well is far more about restraint and self-editing and viciously searching for the exact word and rhythm to say what you want to say skillfully and artistically than it is about having a whomping good time. In fact, it’s not about joy at all. It’s about necessity (yours as a writer) and craft and the internal reward from having done it well. If those two things can come together and create beauty, then wonderful! The fun is entwined in the outcome. You created art. And art is primal, and it sustains us.

The guidelines that hold for great writing of any type hold for the writing in this book, sports be damned. Sports are only the subject, not the essence. Here, as elsewhere, we’re dealing with people and written symbols (marks that form letters that are made into words that can be turned into sentences, paragraphs, stories, books) that must be honored no matter what they are about, because writing—and therefore reading—is hardwired into us somewhere not far from the need to eat and sleep and procreate and send our genetic information into the future.

These building block symbols—these words—are processed by an intricate system in our brain that begins organizing things the moment we are born and sounds and other stimuli are perceived and the need to communicate to stay alive begins. The ability to create printed words and read them, and to have the process reflect the world as we perceive it, is a mystery and miracle of our species.

These days I sometimes fear for the printed word. My own business of newspaper and magazine and book writing has been diminished as steadily as the bark that sheds from an old tree. Newspapers—printed stories written on what has come to be called “hard copy”—are in rapid decline. I stayed at two hotels in the last few months that did not even sell newspapers in the gift shop. This is nobody’s fault. This is progress. This is technology and what it wants, since machines have a goal (paperlessness being one) that is imparted to them by us, the inventors. “Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions,” writes former Wired editor Kevin Kelly in his forward-thinking book What Technology Wants. “As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves . . . If all technology—every last spear and knife—were removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology.”

Obviously, fighting whatever new means of communicating comes along—from smart phone emoticons (do any of those little things remind you of the wall drawings in the Chauvet Cave in France from 30,000 years ago?) to virtual reality to artificial intelligence—is foolish, if not impossible. Technology has an idea of what it wants to do, and where it will go, and we set that goal into motion long before we wedded ourselves to the printed word. The ultimate goal of all technological advancement, most scientists agree, is sentience—the ability to feel, to sense, to be conscious.

The human brain’s abilities seem to come down to electrical matter and circuitry and algorithms and mechanical interplay, all someday knowable as a map, no matter how complex. That “thinking” is possible by machines has already been proven many times over, most recently and amusingly by the Google computer that beat a grandmaster in the astoundingly complicated ancient Eastern game of Go. The notion that the soul was created by divine touch and exists as a penumbra shimmering six inches above the head is pretty much as gone as medieval paintings of saints with glowing halos and cherubs fluttering around them like bats.

“We are all machines that think,” writes Caltech theoretical physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll in an essay in the book What to Think About Machines That Think, “and the distinction between different types of machines is eroding.” MIT physicist Max Tegmark adds, “The advent of machines that truly think will be the most important event in human history.” Well, I would guess so. But here’s the kicker: “Whether it will be the best or worst thing ever to happen to humankind depends on how we prepare for it, and the time to start preparing is now.”

Short of digging bunkers and filling them with anti-robot laser guns and locker-sized nuclear devices, I’m not sure what we normal people can do. One possibility is simply to think about the way our world is changing, so rapidly, faster than we probably want, and to ponder anew our role in it. We can think about the printed word, about how it now is so often electronic and accompanied by music or photos or even a talking head reading aloud the words we could read ourselves if we cared to. Is a virtual reality tour through a western rodeo better than a written story about that same rodeo? Is an edited (on your own device) film about a man flying in a squirrel suit off a mountainside better than a well-worded story about the same?

These things matter because this book honors the craft of writing about sports, not the craft of symbolizing sports stories in some other way. What we’re dealing with is the part of your brain that is stimulated—that learns—when you read something rather than when you get the information in another fashion. Because there is a difference. And I feel, deeply, that something big is lost when the printed word is bypassed in favor of something technologically “advanced.”

So if you’ve made it this far—if you even picked up this book—you probably believe in the printed word as something of unique value, symbolizing much. As I’ve said, I certainly do. If you read series editor Glenn Stout’s foreword, you know that he believes wildly in the printed word, that he was as giddy as can be when he realized he might actually be called in life a “writer.” Glenn and I have talked often about the business of writing, one memorable time being on St. Patrick’s Day a few years ago at a bar in Burlington, Vermont, the town where my son was going to college and where Glenn was playing bodhran in an Irish band. Glenn knows how thrilled I was to be chosen to pick the stories in this year’s edition. He knows that I am in love with writing too.

It wasn’t easy, making the final selections, trust me. The volumes of submitted stories had been winnowed to the many by Glenn, before he sent them off to me in Chicago, and I picked the few, my favorites. Writing—communicating—is not an absolute, and I’m sure some other judge could have picked an entirely different set of stories. But as I told my students when I was a lecturer at Northwestern for a few quarters back in the 1980s, “What I say about your work is just my opinion, based on my knowledge and preferences and quirks, and don’t take my word as gospel because I could be completely wrong and what I say utter nonsense. But I doubt it.”

The stories came to me anonymously, in generic print, except for a couple that were in magazine type, with their magazine labels at the bottom, because they couldn’t be downloaded from the Internet and had to be photocopied from real “hard copies.” Those pieces also had the authors’ names removed, and it didn’t matter an iota to me where the stories had appeared. I read each piece at least once, some more than twice. I sorted them into three stacks—no, yes, maybe—and when I’d finished I took stock. I needed none of the maybes, good as they were, since my yeses held up after further scrutiny. I cataloged what I had: five football stories, three basketball, two bicycling, three boxing, and one each from baseball, running, hiking, hockey, rugby, rowing, rodeo, snooker, wingsuit flying, fishing, drug abuse, skateboarding, and nature, as well as—by God—one about a sportswriter himself, run amok.

My choices of sports were not conscious. I went into each piece looking for a good tale, coherence, sweet word usage, wit, intelligence, knowledge of the topic, and descriptive sentences that painted a vivid picture in my mind’s eye (without using pictures!).

Special points were given for effort by the writer—effort in making the piece smooth, fluent, and provocative without giving the appearance of effort. After all, good writing, like good acting or platform diving, is artifice, making the difficult look graceful and simple. And points were given for physical effort, for those writers who pounded the pavement, worked the phones, interviewed, delved into difficult situations, perhaps even journeyed by boat, snowmobile, dogsled, and snowshoe, at deep personal risk, to the remotest parts of Greenland (thank you, Gretel Ehrlich for “Rotten Ice”!) to report on the way the only world we have is changing for sportsmen—and all humans—for all time.

Another of those effort pieces comes from ESPN: The Magazine’s Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham, who, in “The Patriot Way,” take on the monolith that is the NFL, this season’s version of Big Tobacco. Similarly, brothers and co-writers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru nail the NFL and its concussion myopia by detailing the retirement of San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland after a single season because of his concerns over potential brain damage.

Three more of those dig-in-and-do-it stories are Alexandra Starr’s piece, “American Hustle,” Jon Wertheim and Ken Rodriguez’s “Smack Epidemic,” and John Branch’s epic “Hold On, Boys,” a story that won me over as it wove together rodeo, family, and the essential freedom that Americans cherish and will fight not to lose.

I found myself thinking long and hard after reading William Browning’s detailed piece “A Long Walk’s End,” about a multimillion-dollar embezzler who eluded capture for years by courteously hiking the Appalachian Trail with other outdoorsmen; and Eric Moskowitz’s emotion-packed “Her Decision, Their Life,” about a victim of the Boston Marathon bombing having to choose, after months of rehabilitation, whether to have her remaining but crippled leg amputated or not. It’s hard to forget a line like this, describing the medical pain chart that goes from zero to 10: “Ten was the worst you could imagine, pain she never knew until she got blown up.”

Not every selection is grim (and even the grim tales are told with beauty). I laughed out loud and nodded with understanding at Matt Calkins’s tale about the impact on one man of the Seattle Seahawks nearly mute Marshawn Lynch, and Chris Ballard, a Sports Illustrated treasure, had me chortling and spewing with his tale about the nerd Caltech hoopsters’ rise to success (for them).

Michael McKnight’s yearlong quest to dunk, “Learn to Dunk,” is both funny and crazily earnest. Me, I love obsessive nuts like McKnight. As with many of these stories, there’s a brief Internet video accompanying it. It’s downright ridiculous, time-lapsing his quest over 363 days. But read the piece—it’s better.

I don’t have the space to praise every contributor. I wish I did. Brilliant writers Chris Jones, Wright Thompson, and Michael Rosenberg you’ll find within. And veteran Steve Rushin does his crazy thing, this time having a ball at the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England, where he “saw English knights dropping chain-mail trousers, Tonga supporters parting grass skirts, and kilted Scotsmen fartin’ through tartan.”

I’m sorry, I have a thing for silliness too. But above all, what I wanted here was entertainment, value for your effort as a reader with all those techno distractions all around. You deserve to be entertained. A reader makes a pact with a writer, and that bond must be honored and respected.

Note, too, that it’s hard for any account of a big sports event or a much-watched game to make it into these pages. Those uber-stories, viewed and dissected firsthand by audiences everywhere, have been told and retold in too many places to be original anymore. I mean, is there one more thing you want to read about the great Tom Brady? Last year’s World Series? Lance Armstrong’s demise?

I prefer John Brant’s lovely, zesty tale about the curious Chinese student Zilong Wang, who rode a bike across our country and found America in the process. I prefer, too, Chris Wiewiora’s magic piece “Board in the Florida Suburbs,” about how his own teen slacker skateboard ways led him to college and pending adulthood. And the story “About Winning,” by college champion female rower Henley O’Brien (a pseudonym, but don’t worry, she’s real)—please just read it and you will know more than seems possible in so few words about the overbearing, damaged, needy men who so often coach us and our children.

The power of words. The splendor of words. The transcendence of words. The grip of words. All here.

High tech, see ya later.

 

RICK TELANDER