The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024
I wasn't enforcing a new agenda as much as I just wasn’t enforcing the old one
Earlier this year I was knee deep in great sports writing. Triumph Publishing tapped me to be the next guest editor for The Year’s Best Sports Writing, and I was trying to read every link sent my way by colleagues and into the gmail inbox set up for submissions.
My former colleague Richard Deitsch did the 2023 edition. I was part of his advisory committee, and I saw how seriously he took it. This is a venerable volume, edited by the likes of George Plimpton, Dick Schaap and Bud Collins. From 1991 to 2020 it was published by Houghton Mifflin, and Triumph Publishing took it over in 2021 thanks to Glenn Stout’s efforts to keep it going.
When we discussed the series on his Sports Media podcast, Deitsch noted that we might not be among those giants of sportswriting, but we were qualified, willing and available. Each year, there are about 25 stories in the volume.
I sifted through hundreds of stories, some great and some good. We all seek recognition in our work, and many young writers sent their best pieces to the inbox in hopes that maybe they would be seen. Deitsch gave me some great advice: pick the stories you wake up the next day thinking about. He also served on my advisory board for the volume, along with J.A. Adande, Kavitha Davidson and Sandy Padwe.
When the dust settled, I knew I had a lot more stories by and about women than typically show up in this anthology. Triumph put Caitlin Clark on the cover, and that seemed fitting for a whole lot of reasons. Women’s sports are surging, so of course there is going to be more writing about them at all levels.
Recently, the Charlotte, N.C. NPR affiliate asked me to sit down for an hour with interviewer Erik Spanberg for a show called Charlotte Talks on WFAE. During the interview, Spanberg offered some numbers. When the Best American Sports Writing of the Century came out in 1999, there were two stories by women and one about women.
My anthology with 25 stories, Spanberg noted, has 11 about women and nine by women. You can listen to the entire interview later this week at WFAE. I enjoyed the conversation and it was pretty wide-ranging. We reference the stories in the book, which you can find on amazon and elsewhere.
I hadn’t actually counted. If you ask 100 people in sports to put together this volume, you would likely get 100 different collections. We are all drawn to different stories and ways of telling them. I was of course drawn to Sally Jenkins’ incredible piece about Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, their decades of friendship as they both underwent treatment for cancer. I led the opening essay talking about that piece.
And Emily Sohn’s fascinating story about Virginia Kraft, the first woman who was a full time sportswriter at Sports Illustrated and who covered big game hunting. This story is a time capsule, but told through a modern prism both aware of women’s challenges in covering sports, and a faded enthusiasm for rhino killing.
I’d argue that both of those pieces would make any 2024 volume. There are lot more women than usual to be sure, but it isn’t even half. I was also drawn to the investigative work that is a vital part of sports writing, and I am less fond of the reflexively worshipful writing that is common in the space. I like complicated stories, and relationships.
In the 30-year history of that volume, there were just two women editors, Jane Leavy and Jackie MacMullan. The same is true for non-white editors, with Michael Wilbon editing in 2012.
You could note that a woman editor has chosen a lot more women for this volume, but there are a few other things to note as well. Why haven’t there been more stories by women, and more about women’s sports?
When I started as a part time high school sports writer in 1998, my first games were exclusively girls sports. I once asked if I was going to be assigned to a boys game and was told, “When you’re ready.”
As you can see, the hierarchy of coverage was communicated early on. To be seen as a serious sportswriter, that meant covering men. Women in sports have had a choice to make, cover the sports that will bring recognition and advancement, or cover women’s sports.
Sports are about culture as much as they are about athletic prowess, and the best writing assignments in sports were about men in sports. Those were often assigned to the most important writers, also men. Those men knew they didn’t have to pay attention to women’s sports or pitch those stories. Ernest Hemingway remained the assignment editor in spirit.
I didn’t feel like I was enforcing a new agenda as much as I just wasn’t enforcing the old one.
When Mary Wittenberg was CEO of the New York Road Runners in 2005, she offered the winner of the women’s New York City marathon more than she offered the men’s. Now, in other marathons across the planet at that time, the pay disparity went the other way. She was making an intentional point — we don’t see a pay disparity that goes the other way.
Wittenberg ran the NYRR for almost 20 years. Making that point wasn’t the only thing she did to reinvent the NYC Marathon, but I doubt a man in her role would have done it.
I hope you’ll read the book. There isn’t a story here that won’t make you think, or laugh. And you can rest assured that someone else with a completely different set of affinities will put it together next year.