The Best American Sports Writing 1991

The articles in this superb book delve more deeply into the social and political settings of sports and the complexities of personalities involved in them than is the norm on the TV-influenced sports pages of today. Many of the book's most unusual essays focus on seldom-covered sports and come from unlikely pens. Frank Conroy brings the same methodical intensity to perfecting his pool shooting as a 15-year-old truant that he later would give to more intricate autobiographical subjects. Stephen King finds Little League baseball fraught with metaphors for reaching maturity. Florence Shinkle lends a gentle wit to the improbable sport of pigeon racing. Others are closer to their home fields, with particularly telling contributions from William Nack (a moving remembrance of Secretariat, whose career was closely entwined with his own); Roger Angell on the 1990 pennant race; and the late Shelby Strother on a Detroit schoolboy hoops hero gone to pieces as a result of mental illness. This is projected as the first of an ongoing series, and any serious sports fan will be rooting for its success. Halberstam wrote The Next Century ; Stout is co-editor of Ted Williams. (Nov.)