Great sports writing - by Flinder Boyd, Lee Jenkins & David Fleming

There's three different pieces of sports feature writing that struck me as outstanding lately, with two of them reminding me of other stories I've posted on.

For SB Nation Longform was "20 Minutes At Rucker Park" by Flinder Boyd on 24-year-old TJ Webster Jr. and his trip to the famed Rucker Park basketball courts in New York City. Webster hoped to play well enough in the pickup games that he might get a shot at playing professionally and Boyd (who was a pro player and now solid writer) traveled by bus from Sacramento with Webster to chronicle his experience. What results is a compelling look at Webster taking his shot at glory (not to get too hyperbolic) and Boyd does a great job of writing the piece in a way that would make a reader care, but not losing his objectivity as could happen in a piece such as this.

It was excellent stuff that reminded me of a previous SB Nation Longform piece by Brandon Sneed, "The Prospect" on Montaous Walton and his attempts to fashion himself as a professional baseball player. The story on Walton was more about his fabrications and that on Webster more about hope, but definite parallels between the two well written stories.

The second recent piece to note here was the Sports Illustrated cover story this week, "Kobe Bryant: Reflections on a cold-blooded career" by Lee Jenkins. Really a terribly interesting feature that made me think of another piece by Jenkins, the 2012 SI Sportsman of the Year story on LeBron James in that both pieces on gifted and driven basketball players, and both written well in a very segmented style (with me posting last year on the structure that Jenkins employed in his story on James).

The third piece of recent excellent sports writing to mention was "The Marathon of Their Lives" by David Fleming for ESPN. About two separate runners in the 2011 Chicago Marathon, Will Caviness and Amber Miller, it was a fascinating piece to me in that early on, I expected it to end with a climactic moment that involved both runners, but instead was a completely different and a more nuanced story that surprised me. It's of course great to read something that you're immediately hooked into from the beginning, but this piece was a different type of great in that it was really memorable to me after reading it.

J.R. Moehringer Writing

As this blog is all about great writing... the reading of it, the linking to and commenting on it, I find myself constantly seeking out information on and new work from the writers I like the most.

Picking up a Sport Illustrated and seeing that Susan Casey (who I first wrote on here) has a new book excerpted there (which I then posted about), reading a Roger Ebert blog post which gives an e-mail address for Esquire writer Chris Jones, finding out Erik Larson has a book coming out in May... to me, that stuff is just golden.

To this whole writing crush concept, I'm kind of amazed that it's not terribly easy to find much about the excellent writer J.R. Moehringer (author of "The Tender Bar" ... one of my two favorite books read last year, with the aforementioned Casey book as the other). Yea, he's got a Wikipedia page, but in today's hyper connected twitter-using world, I expected to find more about him and what he's working on. Fairly incredibly to me, a google search for the term "who does J.R. Moehringer write for?" provided my "Tender Bar" review as the fourth result.

With this as the impetus, I set out to find and read me some more Moehringer... and glad I did.

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First thing I found was a Sept 2010 piece for GQ titled "Three Weeks in Crazyville". About the author's time spent with LeBron James prior to his "The Decision" ESPN event, it's great writing about both a guy (James) and a process. It reminded me of his "Tender Bar" memoir in that Moehringer injects himself into the story and as a result reveals more about James by revealing the process of writing about him. Not to overstate things, but it struck me as a pretty audacious approach... that worked very well.

While reading this piece, I saw mention on the GQ site of another Moehringer athlete profile from earlier in 2010. "In It To Win It" looks at the life and drive of Kobe Bryant and while the story was written in a more conventional manner than that on James, it's still solid work on a pretty fascinating guy.

Two other features from Moehringer I found (and enjoyed) whilst browsing on the worldly wide interwide net...

Written on the town of Gees Bend, Alabama, "Crossing Over" looks at a pocket of the country unknown to many and seemingly caught in a tug of war between staying that way and becoming "modernized". While I wasn't as captivated by this as I was the GQ pieces (primarily due to interest in the subject), it's excellent writing from Moehringer... as evidenced by his 2000 Pulitzer Prize for the story.

Also from the L.A. Times (and later made into a movie), "Resurrecting the Champ" is about Moehringer's relationship with and search for the truth about an ex heavyweight boxing contender. It's pretty riveting stuff and though written some 13 years before the story on James, features (very effectively) the same narrative device of writing about writing. Reading about the author's intereactions with the subject provides a piercing view into him.

So, anyhoo... Moehringer... really solid writer and I look forward to reading more stuff by him in the future.

Now, if only he would get a twitter account and/or blog to make said stuff easier to find...

Sports Illustrated Kobe Bryant and Rex Ryan Pieces

A couple of solid articles from the June 22 Sports Illustrated that really get into the character of the people covered.



Attached to the cover image, Chris Ballard wrote a piece titled "Satisfaction" about Kobe Bryant's now realized single-minded pursuit of his fourth NBA title. Like him or not, I think it would be an interested read for a lot of sports fans in it's portrayal of one guy's drive.

Also from this issue was Tim Layden's story "The Joy of Rex" about New York Jets first-year coach Rex Ryan. What I found interesting about the portrayal of Rex (as well as brother Rob and father Buddy) was their dedication to football, each other and doing the job the way they felt it should be done... even if that ran counter to what others thought.

Finally, it's different than the first two pieces noted above, but also bears mentioning a hockey blog post I did on the Penguins Stanley Cup win... an article about which is also linked to from this issue.

Yep, a lot of interesting stuff in this one.