Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith

""I've always had the feeling that the most compelling and significant story was the one occurring beyond the game before it, after it, above it, or under it, deep in the furnace of the psyche."" It is precisely this instinct to go beyond to find the humanity and grace, will power and fear within the story that makes Smith's writing so clear, vivid and passionate. Smith, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, isn't the kind of sportswriter who fires off questions and records the answers there's nothing pro forma about the way he works or how he is able to capture and reveal the small, unexpected details ""that make or unmake a life."" Neither does he just focus on the big names in professional and college sports, although Muhammad Ali, Mark McGwire, Mike Tyson and Pat Summitt appear in this volume of exceptional journalism. Smith finds the same zeal at the high-school level, as in the tale of Jonathan Takes Enemy, a one-time high-school basketball star nearly destroyed by drink and yet determined to make it as a college player. Some of Smith's stories aren't about winners at all but about those others who are lured in by their love of the game. For example, ""Someone to Lean On"" describes Radio, the lovable, mentally disabled man who learned to speak while managing numerous sports teams at T.L. Hanna High School in Anderson, S.C. Indeed, these 15 pieces set a new standard for sportswriting. Whether the reader is a die-hard fan or a lover of gifted storytelling, he or she will find Smith's book impossible to put down. (Oct.) FYI: Smith is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and was once selected in a poll of Associated Press editors as the sportswriter they'd most like to hire.