Ultimate Sports

Recipient of the 1992 ALAN Award for outstanding contributions to the field of adolescent literature, Donald R. Gallo is the editor of a number of award-winning books for young people as well as for their teachers. He has compiled and edited seven other collections of short stories for Bantam Doubleday Dell, including
Short Circuits, Join In
, and
No Easy Answers
. His first collection,
Sixteen: Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults
, was named by the American Library Association as one of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992. His most recent book for teachers, coauthored with Sarah K. Herz, is
From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges Between Young Adult Literature and the Classics
.

SKTEEN: SHORT STORIES BY OUTSTANDING WRITERS FOR
YOUNG ADULTS
,
edited by Donald R. Gallo

VISIONS: NINETEEN SHORT STORIES BY OUTSTANDING WRITERS FOR
YOUNG ADULTS
,
edited by Donald R. Gallo

CONNECTIONS: SHORT STORIES BY OUTSTANDING WRITERS FOR
YOUNG ADULTS
,
edited by Donald R. Gallo

SHORT CIRCUITS: THIRTEEN SHOCKING STORIES BY OUTSTANDING
WRITERS FOR YOUNG ADULTS
,
edited by Donald R. Gallo

JOIN IN: MULTIETHNIC SHORT STORIES BY OUTSTANDING WRITERS
FOR YOUNG ADULTS
,
edited by Donald R. Gallo

IRONMAN
,
Chris Crutcher

STAYING FAT FOR SARAH BYRNES
,
Chris Crutcher

BLUE SKIN OF THE SEA
,
Graham Salisbury

SNOW BOUND
,
Harry Mazer

THE ACCIDENT
,
Todd Strasser

For Cheryl Karp Ward,
who provided the motivation
for this collection
and
in memory of my former coaches
at Eastside High School,
Henry Rumana
and Joseph Frank

Thanks
to all of the following for their roles in the formation and production of this book:

teacher Sarah K. Herz and her students in Westport, Connecticut; teacher Bill Mollineaux and his students in West Hartford, Connecticut; library/media specialist Cheryl Karp Ward and her students in Windsor Locks, Connecticut; and my students at Central Connecticut State University for their help in choosing the title for this book…

sports fan Dan Ward for his assessments of several of the stories submitted for this collection…

and Michelle Poploff for her publishing direction, judgments, and support.

               
Introduction

WARMING UP

Joyriding
Jim Naughton

Fury
T. Ernesto Bethancourt

Superboy
Chris Crutcher

OVERCOMING ADVERSITY

If You Can’t Be Lucky…
Carl Deuker

Stealing for Girls
Will Weaver

Shark Bait
Graham Salisbury

COMPETING

Cutthroat
Norma Fox Mazer

The Assault on the Record
Stephen Hoffius

The Defender
Robert Lipsyte

DEALING WITH THE UNEXPECTED

Just Once
Thomas J. Dygard

Brownian Motion
Virginia Euwer Wolff

Bones
Todd Strasser

Sea Changes
Tessa Duder

The Gospel According to Krenzwinkle
David Klass

HANDLING DISAPPOINTMENTS

Falling off the Empire State Building
Harry Mazer

The Hobbyist
Chris Lynch

Millions
of teenagers, as well as adults, participate daily in some kind of athletic activity, whether through being a student in a phys ed class, playing on an interscholastic sports team, taking an aerobics class, weight-lifting at a neighborhood gym, or zipping around the local park on Rollerblades. And if we’re not actively participating in some organized sporting activity, we’re watching one in a stadium or on television. We also read about sports: in the daily newspaper, in magazines, and in books—fiction as well as nonfiction.

Although mysteries and horror stories, along with stories about the supernatural, top the lists of teenagers’ reading preferences, ask any group of boys in grades six through twelve what else they prefer to read—when they do read—and they’ll say “Sports!” Girls, of course, will read sports books and articles too.

During the first half of the 1990s a significant number of first-rate sports novels were published, each featuring teenagers in a variety of athletic pursuits: baseball, basketball,
running, ice hockey, boxing.…But there hasn’t been a good collection of interesting and insightful short stories about teenagers in sports in a long time. I decided it was time for a new collection of sports stories for young people—not just a slapped-together handful of stories taken from previously published books and magazines, but new, exciting, never-before-published stories written especially for this book.

So I contacted a variety of well-known authors who have written award-winning novels about sports—such as Robert Lipsyte and Chris Crutcher—along with a few other writers who are not known for their sports books but whose novels have gained special attention and who have inside information about sports, as well as an understanding of teenagers.

I told these writers that I wasn’t looking for stories about how to play specific sports, or stories that contain blow-by-blow accounts of sporting events that bore everyone except the most avid practitioners. Instead I asked them to write stories that were more about the teenagers involved in sports activities than about the conduct of the sports themselves. I wanted stories about believable teenagers involved in challenging activities that reveal their motivations and show their emotional as well as their physical conflicts as they prepare for and participate in a variety of athletic activities.

Here, then, are the results of my requests: an unprecedented collection of sixteen stories about teenage athletes written by the best authors in the field.

It is important to note that almost every one of these writers participated in one or more sports as a teenager—usually the traditional team sports of baseball, basketball, football, and track. And almost every one of them today
participates in some kind of athletic activity—from basketball and racquetball to swimming and triathlon to walking for exercise. Because the writers, for the most part, have themselves been participants in the sports they are writing about, the feelings and actions in these tales are realistic.

The stories in this book deal with a variety of team and individual sports, though not every major sport is covered. It is, perhaps, fitting that there is no baseball story in this collection, since these stories were written during the summer of 1994, when professional baseball disappeared from television screens and ballparks across the country and there was no World Series. But you will find in these pages stories about basketball, football, tennis, boxing, wrestling, sailing, racquetball, running, fishing, and a few other sports, some of which you’ve probably never even considered, along with one that author Robert Lipsyte envisions as an interscholastic sport of the future.

But the inclusion or omission of any particular sport is not what matters in a collection of stories like this. It’s not the details and statistics about a specific sport that give a story life and relevance, that make it important or memorable. It’s the way the characters—the young men and women—deal with the challenges those athletic events pose for them: how they prepare for the activities; how they react to the physical pain; how they deal with winning and losing; how they interact with teammates, adversaries, friends, and family. In short, it’s not the sport that makes the story, but the people, and their actions and reactions. And it’s the quality of the writing that brings us as readers into the heart of the action and the emotions.

So, sports fans, get comfortable in your seats—you’ve got an unobstructed view, as close to the action as you can be. Enjoy this ultimate sporting activity.