BOOK REVIEW: AMERICAN SPORTSWRITING HAD BANNER 1997

The Best American Sportswriting 1998

Bill Littlefield, Editor and Glenn Stout, Series Editor

Houghton-Mifflin 1998

392 pp., $13.00

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

The annual Houghton-Mifflin Best of anthologies which cover short stories, poems, essays, and sportswriting can often likened to a record album. Sometimes, the entries will not hang together as a unit. At other times, the editors unconsiously create a theme, as the best writing of a certain year may focus on the same kinds of topics.

The 1996 edition had been rife with stories about athletes (Billy Cannon, Golden Richards, Dwight Gooden) who had found trouble either handling fame or dealing life after retirement. The 1997 edition, edited by George Plimpton, had a lot of esoterica -- bullfighting, fishing, fencing, and a memorable story on the esoteric pitcher Greg Maddux.

The 1998 edition, edited by Bill Littlefield -- known to many as the radio host of the weekly show Only A Game -- could have been excused for having the same selection criteria as Plimpton. Littlefield is a Bostonian, Plimpton a Harvard man. Both can be accused of being somewhat self-indulgent -- Plympton for writing about himself on professional football and ice hockey teams, Littlefield for his first-person opinion pieces on radio.

Littlefield confirms this tendency a little bit for his choice of not one, but two pieces by his on-air colleague Charlie Pierce, a writer for Esquire. Pierce contributes a piece on an unvarnished Tiger Woods, catching him in unguarded situations (telling off-color jokes, for instance) which would derail the career of a mere mortal. Pierce's other story is one surrounding the rich Kansas-Kansas State basketball rivalry.

Pierce's stories, however, do not touch one of the strongest underlying themes of The Best American Sportswriting 1998. Instead, it is the rise of women's sports in American culture. And Spanish culture, if you believe Tony Hendra. The GQ writer tells the story of Cristina Sánchez, a rare female matador in a male-dominated athletic activity.

In addition, Tropic's Linda Robertson pens an excellent piece on the careers of tennis prodigues Venus and Serena Williams. She neatly makes the case both for and against the way the two have been handled by father Richard, who has held the reins on her daughters' development perhaps a little too hard in an atmosphere which has burned out Andrea Jaeger and turned Jennifer Capriati from hero to zero in four years.

However, the situation points out how today's risk-versus-reward situation in women's (girls'?) tennis makes every decision crucial to a player's success.

The New Yorker's John Seabrook also has a woman's sports story -- but this one deals with the front office. He shows how Sara Levinson, a female marketing executive has been saddled with the enviable task of making the National Football League "cool" again.

There is just one story from a women's sports magazine. Sports Illustrated's short-lived Women/Sport contributes a scandalous story about sexual abuse and coverups in scholastic and club volleyball.

Steve Marantz of The Sporting News has a well-written opinion piece on his appreciation of women's athletics, while Susan Sterling's first-person account from watching a girls' youth travel soccer team is taken from The North American Review.

For those of you beancounters out there, that is a total of six stories out of the 26 chosen by Littlefield and series editor Glenn Stout.

The variety of stories in this year's anthology is admirable, whether it is the lively piece by Rick Telander about legends of New York playground basketball or Tim Layden' groundbreaking expose about ticket scalping. There are the obligatory stories of fallen athletes like Pete Rose and Mike Tyson. In addition there is a story on former ABA superstar David "Goose" Ligon, who fell into drugs and poverty after his career ended.

But the most beguiling story is that of Los Angeles Times writer J.R. Moehringer, who spent a lot of Gannett money tracking down former boxer Bob Satterfield, who captured the imagination of the fight game by his contradictions: one of the hardest punchers ever in the heavyweight class who also suffered more than his share of first-round knockouts.

The story is less about Satterfield than about Moehringer's journalistic duty to confirm that the 66-year-old bum scrounging for scraps in a California city park was the ex-fighter. In the untiring search for information about Satterfield, Moehringer runs into an assortment of characters who alternately confirm and deny his death several years before, complicating the tale.

But in this labyrinth is not only the truth, but the entire process of how reporters do their work. Notes, information, questioning, tracking down every lead as long as you don't bankrupt your expense account. Doing the job right, even as 24-hour news channels and Internet news services report rumor and innuendo as "breaking news," hiding the truth instead of finding it.

It is stories like these which are not only entertaining, but an affirmation of the old-school journalist as detective, crusader, and storyteller. Pieces like this are extremely rare, and worth the price of the book.