The Best American Sports Writing

Among those profiled in this eclectic collection are a trophy hunter with a God complex, a Texas couple suing a local high school athletic director because their son failed to win a college scholarship and a squirrel-hunting immigrant who becomes the first Hmong elected to city office in Wisconsin. In short, these are not your father's sports stories. In fact, about the only throwback to traditional sports writing is the unhappy fact that, of the 17 essays chosen by novelist Ford (The Sportswriter, etc.), only one is by a woman (Melissa King on playing playground hoops), and none focuses on the current explosion in women's sports. Still, most of the writers assembled here, among them Simon Winchester of Conde Nast Traveler, Houston Press staffer Randall Patterson and Wisconsin English professor John Hildebrand, stand out not just for the captivating way they tell their stories, but for the way they avoid the trendy and overhyped subjects that tend to occupy newspaper sports sections and sports magazines. There are a few familiar topics and names--David Halberstam on Michael Jordan, Shirley Povich on recent baseball feats and David Remnick on Muhammad Ali--but for the most part, this collection offers engrossing studies of lesser-known folks whose quirks and flaws are more interesting than their athletic abilities. (Oct.)