BOOK REVIEW: AMERICAN SPORTSWRITING'S MOMENTS OF 1998

The Best American Sportswriting 1999

Richard Ford, Editor and Glenn Stout, Series Editor

Houghton-Mifflin 1999

234 pp., $13.00

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

If there was ever a moment-driven year in sports, it was 1998. And to its credit, The Best American Sportswriting 1999 was edited to reflect this notion.

From David Halberstam's appreciation in The New Yorker, neatly describing Michael Jordan's final NBA game in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals, to Tom Boswell's Washington Post column noting the ending of Cal Ripken's streak of 2,632 consecutive games played, several very important events are chronicled in this Richard Ford-edited tome.

There is also a David Remnick-penned story memorializing the 25th anniversary of Cassius Clay's stunning TKO of Sonny Liston, the beguiling Sports Illustrated retrospective of the World Hockey Association -- complete with a bedside interview with a dying Camille Henry -- and the final column ever written by the veteran newspaperman Shirley Povich.

In between are the usual off-the-beaten-path tales, usually about hunting and fishing. John McPhee writes about a fish skeleton collector who hangs around large fishing derbies, waiting until after the competition to acquire speciments for a museum in Massachusetts. Interspersed between fish stories are several unforgettable passages in which Willy Bemis, the scientist, dissects the fish and describes every feature in the minute detail of an anthropologist or a coroner.

There is a David Mamet first-person essay about a hunting trip to New England, as well as a John Hildebrand story meshing hunting and the struggle for expatriate Vietnamese to make it in American society

But the best stories in this volume are about relationships. A beguiling first-person essay by freelance writer Melissa King goes through several days in her life as a basketball player on the playgrounds of Chicago. In it, she charms children, falls in and out of love, and competes with the men who dominate the court.

J.D. Dolan's "Pool: A Love Story" goes through the author's account of traveling halfway across the country to learn the techniques of billiards from several old masters, all the while trying to maintain a long-distance relationship.

"Kingpin," written for GQ, is a profile of Pete Weber -- the hard drinking, cursing, meteoric star of the Professional Bowlers' Association -- whose ways have endeared him to some fans, and have also alienated him from his father, PBA Hall of Famer Dick Weber.

The Houston Press's "The Trophy Son" is a timely story about how parental interference in the athletic life of their son resulted in him quitting his high school football and baseball teams, leading to a lawsuit.

But perhaps the highlight of the book shows the deep relationship between a nation and a sport. Guy Lawson's "Hockey Nights" is an in-depth look at the life of the Flin Flon Bombers of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. Lawson, a former member of the team, goes back in the mid-summer and describes the weatherbeaten exterior of the town located in the praries of Manitoba.

Lawson is able to show the reader the nature of ice hockey as Canada's national pastime (though it is lacrosse that is officially the national sport). Players in preseason shootarounds are able to create and improvise, or, as he says it, "hockey for its own sake."

He takes us through the nervous weeks of preseason through the eyes of the working-class fans who are aching for tough hockey, the eyes of the groupies who make eyes at players after every game, and through a number of players whose ambitions at NHL stardom are just starting to fade.

We see players in the first practice start squaring off and fighting each other -- though fights are not allowed in the SJHL. After one brawl, the two combatants check themselves for blood, then shook hands. The explanation: if players stand up for themselves, they are more likely to be accepted by the team.

Lawson uses an interesting literary device in his story: he never uses the given names of the players, but reflects the Canadian tendency to give nicknames -- Sides, Razor, Meeks, Dodger.

Even Lawson is bestowed a nickname, Scoop (a journalist, get it?). His assignment overlaps the regular season in which the Bombers lost their first four games on their way to a disastrous season.

Throughout, Lawson walks that fine line between insider and outsider, former hockey player turned writer. He, however, gave the readers of Harper's Magazine an unforgettable portrait of a town and a country at just the right time: a key moment was a house party in which the team members watched Canada lose the 1995 World Cup of Hockey to the United States.

It was then that one player cursed Wayne Gretzky for a missed backhand shot that would have kept Canada alive. It might have been sacrilege to most sports fans familiar with his achievements, but to this group of junior players, The Great One was just another hockey player, just another peer.