THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603170186
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING 1995
EDITED BY DAN JENKINS
Houghton Mifflin. 265 pp. $24.95, $12.95 paperback.
This book is meant as a celebration of sports journalism, but in a jarring and certainly unintentional way it's also a kind of eulogy. What this volume confirms is the diminishing impact of newspaper sportswriting.
That's understandable, given the advent of televised sports and the saturation coverage of athletics through ESPN and other channels. Also, newspapers don't have the impact they had 30 or 40 years ago. There is too much competition.
Still, it's disconcerting to see that this volume has but one story about ``breaking'' news - in other words, it was written at the time the event was going on.
That is a column by George Vecsey of The New York Times, on the dazzling victory of Ukrainian Oksana Baiul in the women's figure skating finals in the 1994 Winter Olympics.
Vecsey writes:
``Seeing her mother die of ovarian cancer three years ago, sleeping in the rink for a while, now living in a borrowed bed in somebody else's apartment, she has learned to make the most of every chance. Last night she still had a few seconds until the music stopped.
``She was due to perform one more double axel, but intead she tossed in a triple toe, and then she did a combination of a double axel and a double toe, a very demanding performance for anybody at the end of four minutes, particularly a girl who has been run down by another skater in practice 32 hours earlier, particularly a girl operating on three stitches and a pain-killing injection, a girl living on nerve.''
This is splendid writing, giving the reader a sense of nuance and grace that television could never render.
Yet there's no other on-the-spot selection in this book and that's a pity.
Newspaper sports journalism was built upon the on-the-scene reporting of such writers as Grantland Rice, Red Smith and Shirley Povich, but many sports sections increasingly are weighting coverage toward longer, feature-angled stories.
Not all sportswriters agree, and one would think that anthology editor Dan Jenkins would proudly buck that philosophy.
A former Texas newspaperman who became a splendid writer for Sports Illustrated before gaining success as a novelist (``Semi-Tough''), Jenkins writes that his heart is still with the ``ink-stained wretches'' of the press box. This volume's contributors, he writes, constitute ``the strongest lineup of working-press sports writers I've ever seen bunched into a hospitality suite.''
Perhaps the most enjoyable selection is Skip Hollandsworth's ``Whatever Happened to Ronnie Littleton?'' It is a superb piece of storytelling, chronicling the rise and fall of one of Texas' most fabled high school football stars.
But Ronnie Littleton was more than a great running back for Wichita Falls in the early 1970s. He was also the center of a tense time in Wichita Falls - the desegregation of its schools - and Hollandsworth was an impressionable seventh-grader in the town.
Hollandsworth understands well the passions of football and race. He writes: `` `They hate us because we're white,' I remember one of the parents in our neighborhood telling me and my friends. `They think we've ruined their lives. And now they're going to try to ruin ours.' ''
As for the newspaper stories, we have several columns commenting on the baseball strike - all of them seeming outdated. When the sense of immediacy passes, often the relevancy does as well.
But not always. Take the column by Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post in which he explains why, as a black man, he roots for Duke University's basketball team:
``Almost without exception, black kids who play basketball at Duke go to class, get their degrees on time and become contributing citizens. We won't root for them, but we'll root for say, N.C. State, whose graduation rates for black players have been abysmal at times.''
Before the onslaught of sports talk-show yakkers, we trusted sportswriters to give us their insights, their opinions, on what they had just seen. That's the meat-and-potatoes aspect of sports journalism.
Antiquated as some might think them, the sports pages are essential to keeping interest in athletics alive. Let's hope next year's editor of this anthology won't forget this. MEMO: Tim Warren, a former sports copy editor and book editor for The
Baltimore Sun, is a free-lance writer in Silver Spring, Md. by CNB