BOOK REVIEW: 2002 VERSION IS DOWNBEAT, AS PER WORLD EVENTS

The Best American Sportswriting 2002

Rick Reilly, Editor and Glenn Stout, Series Editor

Houghton-Mifflin 2002

286 pp., $13.00

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

You might expect an anthology like The Best American Sportswriting 2002 to reflect the horrible year of 2001 in its pages.

But, as longtime series editor Glenn Stout said a few years ago, readers might expect to find a certain topic ("Where's the Magic Johnson story?" he asked rhetorically in 1992) but many of the stories chosen by Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly have a certain dark tone to them.

The Sept. 11 story -- yes, only one -- chosen for the book is not the SI story on the NYPD-FDNY football rivalry. Instead, it is a Mike Lupica column about a member of the FDNY team who was killed at Tower Two when an office worker jumped out of the building and landed on him.

Similar dark echoes ring through Mike Bianchi's column on Dale Earnhardt's funeral, as well as Gene Wojciechowski's appreciation of the late Al McGuire, the former basketball coach-turned-TV commentator.

The lone story featuring a female athlete saw former long-distance runner Casi Florida staring down death while fighting anorexia and bulemia.

Gary Smith, the basketball savant who finds stories in many out-of-the-way places across the United States, pens a tale of Charlie Huggins, an African American basketball coach who brings his championship mentality to the Amish-dominated town of Hiland, Ohio. It is the usual fish-out-of-water tale, only to find out that he has inoperable brain cancer.

Mark Kram, Jr. paints an indelible tale of despair and irony of the one boy who was saved by football player Joe Delaney, who died himself trying to save him and his two friends. The youth, given a second chance at life, is shown wasting away in the county jail on drug charges.

Further, an afternoon at a bullfight -- in which a matator suffers a near fatal goring -- is written up by GQ's Elizabeth Gilbert, and Baltimore City Paper writer Tom Scocca contributes a story on a boxer who is knocked comatose by an opponent.

And the groundbreaking Sports Illustrated profile of Bob Kalsu, the only NFL player to be killed in Vietnam, appears here as well, along with a story on former NFL player Rae Carruth, who was convicted of murder.

Death doesn't only come to the human condition here; Skip Hollandsworth outlines a possible conspiracy to murder the great race horse Alydar for insurance money.

There are other downbeat stories in this tome as well. Dan LeBatard draws the entire portrait of the Danny Almonte scandal and how it reflects on the values of Dominican-Americans as regards the game of baseball.

Jeanne Marie Laskas' "The Enlightened Man" is a biography of the late Minnesota lineman Korey Stringer, and it is written so timelessly that you cannot tell whether the issue of Esquire in which it was first printed came out before his death in July 2001. Given the circumstances surrounding his passing, Laskas' story sounds very much like a valedictory. But in any other circumstance, it is a very powerful profile.

The 2002 "Best Of" anthology's subplot is the aging athlete. Frank Deford visits the octegenarian fighter Max Schmeling, Eugene Robinson sees a very fit Teofilo Stevenson, and Michael Leahy is allowed to be in the dressing room when Michael Jordan puts on a uniform of an NBA team not named the Chicago Bulls.

The occasional tale of freakishness (backyard wrestling, figure-8 school bus racing) appears as per usual.

But perhaps it is a reflection of the year 2001 that the most uplifting story is at the front the book rather than at its conclusion. Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times writes an extended column on Sarah Morris, a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers whose website, dodgerplace.com, regularly contributes columns for the Dodgers' official website.

The kicker in the story is that Morris has cerebral palsy, and spends hours each day writing columns with a single pointer attached to her forehead.

Plaschke goes through the usual curve emotions surrounding their first contact: surprise, skepticism, anticipation, wonder, inspiration.

It is this kind of inspiration which was sadly lacking in a down year for sports, society, and the nation.

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