This latest installment of sparkling sports prose carries the ultimate imprimatur: the blessing of Rick Reilly, the Sports Illustrated columnist who makes more visits to Salisbury than Liddy Dole. Of course, Dole only comes to Salisbury to burnish her shaky Tar Heel State credentials. Reilly, on the other hand, collects kudos and plaques at the National Sportswriters Hall of Fame here in the Piedmont, a far more important mission than Senator Dole’s.Which makes it all the more fitting that Reilly signed on as guest editor for the newest sports writing collection culled from publications big and small and covering everything from a Florida demolition derby to the death of Alydar. Led by series editor Glenn Stout, The Best American Sports Writing, launched in 1991, gives the games-obsessed among us as much pleasure as a stadium lunch of watered-down beer with a side of stale tortilla chips drowned in processed cheese.
Before you even reach any of the 28 gems Reilly selected, he offers a delightful summary of effective writing. It’s as tight as Frank Gifford’s face, with tips such as this one: “I hate adverbs. I would rather be coated in chicken drippings and dropped in a leopard den than use adverbs.” Well put, wouldn’t you say?
As for the stories, start with William Nack’s “A Name on the Wall,” a profile of Bob Kalsu, a former Oklahoma Sooners lineman whose NFL career was cut short. Not by a knee injury, though. Kalsu, married with two young children, went to Vietnam in 1970, where he wound up leading an overmatched band of soldiers at a hideous hot spot the men called Firebase Ripcord. Kalsu died on that mountaintop July 21, 1970, becoming the first and only professional athlete to die in Vietnam. Two days later, after Jan Kalsu gave birth to their second child, she learned that her husband was dead. Barry Switzer, an Oklahoma assistant coach during Kalsu’s days there, offered Nack a haunting memory of the funeral. “Bob’s daddy got his wife and Jan back to the car,” Switzer said. “After everyone was gone from the grave site, he went back and lay down on the casket.”
Death haunts two other stories in the collection, both with powerful resonance here. Mike Bianchi, an Orlando columnist, took an unusual approach when he covered Dale Earnhardt’s memorial service in Charlotte following his fatal crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. There were, Bianchi writes, just a handful of Winston Cup drivers at Earnhardt’s service. The real surprise? That any of them showed up. After all, racers hate funerals. Earnhardt himself never missed races. He always missed funerals.
“They avoid funerals,” Bianchi writes, “as if they were clogged carburetors. It hurts them to see the survivors suffer; reminds them too much of their own families.”
And, as the notion of broken families makes for great drama, the collection includes, yes, another assessment of former Carolina Panthers receiver Rae Carruth, convicted in a conspiracy to murder his pregnant girlfriend. The account, written by Peter Richmond of GQ, shows not just Carruth’s literal arrested development, but also the wink-wink social carnage endorsed by the NFL and its media machine.
Richmond cuts through the legal droning of Carruth’s trial as a coterie of strippers and girlfriends take the stand, defending a murderous misogynist. “He liked to fuck them, and he liked their attention, and he liked the idea of them, but he didn’t like them” Richmond writes.
I could go on. About Gene Wojciechowski’s elegant tribute to Al McGuire (“Anyway, the crowd at a funeral is governed by the weather,” the former coach once tells him), about Bob Norman’s frightening tale of a suburban backyard wrestling bloodbath, about Joshua Harris Prager’s groundbreaking report on sign-stealing during the New York Giants’ legendary pennant run in 1951.
But that would just take more of your time. Time better spent snapping off SportsCenter and poring over these terrific selections.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2003.
