The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (2 page)

A onetime
BASW
contributor told me a similar story about this book and the role it played in a friendship of his. He and his best friend from college had something of a mercurial relationship. A few years after graduating, they had a falling-out, stopped talking, and lost touch with each other. One day his former friend was killing time at a bookstore, not really looking for anything but just browsing, and he picked up a copy of this book. He absently thumbed through the pages, and when his eyes landed on the contributor's name, he yelled out in surprise, “Hey, I know this guy!” He was so surprised and excited that he grabbed several strangers and just had to show them that he knew one of the contributors: “My best friend from college wrote this!!!”

That gave him an excuse to reconnect. He called the contributor, told him about finding his story in this book, and they started talking again. They have remained close ever since, a friendship saved by the power and reach of words—and a little help from
The Best American Sports Writing.

Then there was the time I accepted an invitation to speak. When I arrived and met the man who had invited me, we started chatting. He was a teacher, he said, and knew of me primarily from this book. He told me that when he got the book each fall he would set it aside without even cracking it open, waiting for a snow day. Then, on that special day in the late fall or early winter when he would get the call informing him that school was canceled, he knew it was time. As the snow fell he would settle into a comfortable chair, open the book, and spend his unscheduled holiday sinking into its pages. Now, when the phone rings in my house with news of a snow day or I sit as the snow falls reading through submissions, I think of him.

I could go on, but of all the stories this book has inspired I do have a favorite. A longtime reader of this title was on a bus—or perhaps a subway train, I can't recall—when a young person saw him carrying this book and struck up a conversation. As they chatted this reader mentioned that he was a sportswriter. The younger person, as yet undecided on a career, liked to write, liked sports, and grew curious. So he asked the sportswriter how one becomes a working writer, what courses to take and what to read—all the things young writers worry about. The sportswriter did his best to answer, but they soon arrived at the next stop. It was time to part ways, and he knew he had not answered all the young man's questions.

Then he remembered that he was carrying this book. As they parted he simply handed the young writer-to-be his copy of
The Best American Sports Writing.
“Just read this,” he said.

I like to think it helped a young writer get off to a good start. One day I hope to hear the rest of that story, perhaps even in this book.

 

Each year I read every issue of hundreds of sports and general interest magazines in search of writing that might merit inclusion in
The Best American Sports Writing.
I also write or email the editors of many hundreds of newspapers and magazines and request submissions, and I send email notices to hundreds of readers and writers whose addresses I have accumulated over the years. I search for writing all over the Internet and make regular stops at online sources like
Sportsdesk.org
,
Gangrey.com
,
Byliner.com
,
Longreads.com
,
Longform.org
,
Nieman.org
, and other sites where notable sports writing is highlighted or discussed. Still, I also encourage everyone—readers and writers, friends and family, editors and enemies—to send me stories they believe should appear in this volume. Writers in particular are encouraged to submit—do not be shy about sending me either your own work or the work of those you admire.

Each submission 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 2014.
  
• must not be a reprint or book excerpt.
  
• must have been published in the United States or Canada.
  
• must be received by February 1, 2015.
  

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 publication name and address. Photocopies, tear sheets, or clean copies are fine. Readable reductions to 8½-by-11 are preferred. Newspaper stories should be submitted with either the original newspaper copy of the piece or a photocopy of the piece as originally published—not a printout of the web version. Individuals and publications should please use common sense when submitting multiple stories. I receive a heavy volume of material, so no submissions can be returned or acknowledged; it is also 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—weather conditions in midwinter here at
BASW
headquarters often keep me from receiving UPS or FedEx submissions. Electronic submissions by any means, whether email or Twitter or URLs, and pdfs or other electronic documents are not acceptable. Only some form of hard copy, please. The February 1 deadline is real, and work received after that date may not be considered.

Please submit either an original or a clear paper copy of each story, including publication name, author, and the date the story appeared, to:

 

Glenn Stout

PO Box 549

Alburgh, VT 05440

 

All submissions from me to the guest editor are made blindly, not identified by source or author.

Those with questions or comments may contact me at
[email protected]
. Copies of 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 my website,
glennstout.net
, as can full instructions on how to submit a story. 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
.

Thanks to guest editor Christopher McDougall for his attentiveness, to Michael Everett, Joel Reese, Wright Thompson, and Jon Gold for sharing their
BASW
stories with me, and to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for supporting this book. My thanks also go to Siobhan and Saorla for stumbling over the occasional carton of submissions and not complaining too much. And to the writers collected within, I hope this book helps you find more stories.

G
LENN
S
TOUT

Alburgh, Vermont

D
EATH-ROW CELLS
have better natural light than the Rite Aid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where you can only glimpse the sky through the sad slit of a window above the checkout counter. That's where I was gazing one afternoon when two bodies suddenly sailed past.

These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they'd been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I'd watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those blue bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren't leaving any time soon. “You start practicing parkour,” one told me, “and whole nights disappear.”

Technically, he was talking about
l
'art du deplacement
, more universally known by the funkified version of its other name,
parcours
—French for “obstacle course.” Parkour was born in the late 1980s, when a band of mixed-race kids living on the outskirts of Paris got tired of being roughed up by bullies. Together, they created their own “training method for warriors,” as cofounder David Belle would explain. The original parkour tribe didn't mind mentoring other true believers who were willing to submit to their punishing tutorials, but otherwise they had just about zero interest in sharing their skill with the rest of the world. They detested the idea of competition and produced no training videos or instruction books. Until very recently, you had only two choices if you wanted to learn parkour: go to France or try your luck with YouTube.

Not surprisingly, the two guys I met in the Rite Aid parking lot got their start on the YouTube route. They studied videos of other self-taught parkour disciples and broke down lightning-quick sequences, frame by frame, into individual moves. Like the original parkour crew, they were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under the hard edges of the city landscape the way monkeys tumble through the trees.

“I got into it because I was so fat,” Neal Schaeffer told me. He'd begun partying after high school and by age 20 had bloated up from 175 pounds to 240. One afternoon he was in the park watching some strangers “Kong-vault” picnic tables—they'd charge a table, plant their hands, and shoot both feet through their arms like gorillas and fly off the other side—and Neal was talked into giving it a try. Neal was shocked to discover that even out of shape, once he got over his fear he could master skills that at first looked impossible.

Well, maybe not
master.
“You're on this endless trajectory where you're always getting better, but it's never good enough,” Neal explained. “That's what's so exciting. As soon as you land one jump, you can't wait to try it again. You're always looking for ways to make it cleaner, stronger, flow into your next move.” Neal became a member of a local parkour tribe that likes to train after midnight, when the city is all theirs. Whenever a police car prowls by, they drop to the ground and bang out push-ups. “No matter what time it is, no one bothers you when you're exercising.” Within a year, Neal was so fit and trim he was able to scramble to the roof of a three-story building and hang off the flagpole like Spider-Man.
You
'
re back
, he told himself.

Neal still doesn't rank his skills on the level of Andy Keller, a recent college grad who returned to Lancaster to rejoin his local parkour homies. You can tell within about 90 seconds of meeting Andy that he'd probably be superb at any sport he tried. He's strong and graceful, with a swimmer's broad back and enough bad-assery, as I witnessed firsthand the day we met, to bust out a back flip in the middle of a crowded coffee shop because his buddy dared him. I'd come to see him because of a theory I was looking into that the sports that truly evolved from human survival were the ones with the smallest performance gap between men and women. Logically, anything our ancestors relied on to stay alive would be activities that both men and women, old and young alike, would be good at. Endurance sports fit the bill, as 64-year-old Diana Nyad demonstrated when she became the first person to ever swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. And what about parkour? With its emphasis on agility, control, and creativity, was it the tightest link we have in sports to our evolutionary past?

Andy agreed to show me the ropes. Which is how, a few days later, I found myself facing a six-foot-high brick wall outside a bank during the lunch-hour rush on the busiest street in Lancaster. “You've got to learn to shut out distractions,” Andy said. “Forget who's watching you. Forget where you are. Just focus, and go.” Then he broke into a sprint, hitting the wall full speed. He ran right up the bricks, grabbing for the top and vaulting over. As he trotted back, he was met with applause. An audience had formed, blocking the sidewalk.

“Impressive, isn't he?” I said to the guy beside me.

“I knew he'd make it,” the man responded. “I'm waiting to see if
you
do.”

 

Nosy Guy just bugged me at the time, but later—much later, when I was sitting in the middle of dozens of great sports stories from the past year and trying to put my finger on what connected them—I thought back to the way he'd watched me bang the tar out of my knees that afternoon and realized I was kind of glad he'd been there. In his own way, Nosy Guy is what sports writing is all about. Our games are at their best when they're shared, when electricity jumps from the player on the field to the fan in the stands and a connection is sparked between what you see and what you believe you can do yourself.

That's what happened to me when I came across David Merrill's wonderful story “The One-Legged Wrestler Who Conquered His Sport, Then Left It Behind” and Amanda Hess's “You Can Only Hope to Contain Them,” her so-smart (and superbly titled) piece on, arguably, the most important breakthrough in athletic equipment of our lifetime: the sports bra. I felt the shock; the spark crackled between my life and two worlds I knew nothing about. I'd never imagined what it would be like to kneel on a mat with one leg and hope I could somehow burst up and around and take down someone with all limbs attached. Deep-diving into that experience through Merrill's reporting made me think that maybe, you know, scuffing myself up on a brick wall to learn parkour wasn't much to whine about after all. And wow! To reach the peak of collegiate wrestling despite that handicap and then suddenly walk away because . . . well, dig in for yourself and find out.

Likewise with breasts. I didn't know Amanda Hess's writing before coming across this piece, but I'm on high alert from now on. What remains with you after you've read it isn't even her light-touch storytelling and ability to pull up just the right tales to bring her point to life, but the gratitude you feel whenever someone opens your eyes so that you see things differently from then on. When I finished reading the stories nominated for this year's collection, I was so blown away I went online to announce, “I'll stack
Best American Sports Writing 2014
against any
Best American
anything of any year.” I'd never known I could feel sympathy for such devils as Don King, a criminal cage fighter, and bull sharks. Until Don Van Natta Jr. unearthed secrets from a generation ago, I had no idea that Bobby Riggs loved Billie Jean King. Truly loved her.