BOOK REVIEW: "REALITY" TINGE TO BEST SPORTSWRITING ANTHOLOGY

The Best American Sportswriting 2003

Buzz Bissinger, Editor and Glenn Stout, Series Editor

Houghton-Mifflin 2002

327 pp., $13.00

By Al Mattei

Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Given the fact that the 2003 version of "The Best American Sportswriting" was given to Buzz Bissinger, the author of "Friday Night Lights," it is fitting that not a single column-length story appears amongst the 25 picked.

Instead, the stories are magazine-length or even a little longer, with insights that almost have a "reality show" feel to them. Bissinger picked a wide variety of stories that paint sports on the unsavory canvas of a post 9-11 world.

Sure, there is a terrorism story: the Sports Illustrated recap of what went wrong in 1972 when Palestinian terrorists murdered a number of Israeli athletes.

But there are plenty of stories about other vices. Drugs are a vital undercurrent in the story "Power Pact," Juliet Macur's story from The Dallas Morning News about former powerlifer Henry Pacifico and whether his sins from taking steroids will be passed onto his son Jimmie.

Drugs also figure in -- perhaps more than people knew at the date of publication -- a remarkable profile on Barry Bonds. In the story "Baseball Beyond Metaphor," David Grann of The New York Times Magazine is allowed into Bonds' inner circle and even into one of his weightlifting sessions.

In the story, Greg Anderson -- indicted in the spring of 2004 for trafficking in the substance THG -- is shown helping Bonds with his lifting and the preparation of his six small meals he has every day. Bonds says, and pretty tellingly, "In three years, this is all coming off. My wife likes me this big, but I can't stand it."

But as aloof as Bonds has been in his career, he pales in comparision to chess grand master Bobby Fischer and tennis player Pancho Gonzalez. Both are shown as bitter, angry people as their prime years slipped away.

The same goes for Michael Jordan, in a story written for The Washington Post Magazine. Michael Leahy followed the basketball legend in his first season with the Washington Wizards, and he gives a picture of a cigar-chomping gambler who perhaps damaged the future of the franchise by imposing his "Jordan Rules" on a moribund team that responded to very little else.

There is a healthy dose of blind rage in the story "I Want To Kill Him" by Mark Kram Jr. of The Philadelphia Daily News. The story is about the aftermath of a boxing match when Beethavian Scotland died after fighting George Khalid Jones.

The greed that sport can engender is found in the story "The Ball," which is part biography and part reality show. The story, written by Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated, is about the two men who claim to have caught Barry Bonds' 73rd home run ball from his record season.

The Rebecca Mead story "A Man-Child In Lotusland", written for The New Yorker, could almost be turned into an episode of MTV's "Cribs" or an InStyle special, as readers accompany Shaquille O'Neal into his opulent Los Angeles lifestyle.

Bissinger gives us some sleaze, too. The groundbreaking ESPN: The Magazine story "Out Of Control" follows the story of a 14-year-old academic genius who, upon being housed with the football team, finds herself entering a cycle of drugs, sex, and alcohol at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

But there are plenty of uplifting stories among the downbeat. Terry Pluto of The Akron Beacon-Journal does his best Jimmy Cannon imitation in telling the story of Mark Mesko, a student football manager at a local high school who has autism.

And Elizabeth Gilbert's GQ story "Lucky Jim" tells a stunning tale of recovery by a former Yale football player who goes through an amputation procedure after getting hit by a bus, only to be made a quadraplegic eight years later after being struck by a van.

There is, of course, the story of the fall of the athlete in retirement, a story found all-too often in past volumes of this series. Besides the Gonzalez and Fischer stories, there is the tragic story of 1984 men's downhill gold medalist Bill Johnson, whose attempted skiing comeback in 2001 put him in a coma with permanent brain damage.

And there is also the story of Rulon Gardner, the Greco-Roman wrestler who found himself at the bottom of gorge after a snowmobiling accident. He lost a few toes from the resulting frostbite.

But perhaps the most telling sign of the times is the story "Fowled Away," Bill Plaschke's profile on Ted Giannoulas, better known as The San Diego Chicken. The telling part of the story is that the game of major-league baseball has become too corporate and insular for him to ply his trade as a between-innings entertainer and had had to work exclusively in the minor leagues.

(Founder's Note: Giannoulas was invited for the final games the San Diego Padres played at Qualcomm Stadium in 2003 before moving into Petco Park).

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