Know why some days I wish God had made me a sportswriter? ‘Cause sportswriters get to write sentences like this:
Then again, had The National not spent money the way that it did, it's unlikely that it would have sent Sam Donnellan all the way to Tokyo to watch the unbeatable Mike Tyson face off against an overweight schlub named Buster Douglas. (Later, it spent a lot of money sending a whole bunch of us to Vegas to watch Buster, an overweight schlub once again, underclub a left hand against Evander Holyfield and get starched for his trouble.)
I love that. “Underclub a left hand against Evander Holyfield and get starched for his trouble.”
Then again, maybe it’s not enough to be a sportswriter. Maybe to write stuff like that you have to be a particular sportswriter.
I also like the anecdote about Karl Malone’s mother chopping down her own tree to punish the recruiters pestering her son.
And the quote from John Stockton’s father on not having his son’s photograph hanging up in his bar.
No, I’m not going to quote the quote here or tell the story. You can go read them at Grantland.
A lot of Pierce’s fans are excited that he’s going to be blogging regularly about politics for Esquire, and rightly so. But to me he’ll always be the guy who wrote one of the best collections of sports essays going.
Sports Guy: In Search of Corkball, Warroad Hockey, Hooters Golf, Tiger Woods, and the Big, Big Game
His most recent book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
"When Dan Jenkins wrote about an Oklahoma game, he could make you think, well, screw Paris in the '20s — Norman, Okla., is the only place to be. While I was at The National, I finally made it to Norman. I realized that what had made Norman great was that Jenkins was there."
That sounds about right. One of my oldest friends was thinking about graduate school at Oklahoma, and they flew him out. He asked, "What do you do for fun here?" And the response was "During football season, or after football season."
He stayed in the Big Ten.
Posted by: Ken Houghton | Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:52 PM
God is a sportswriter.
Or rather, was
Posted by: actor212 | Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 12:10 PM
I just went to Grantland's home page and looked at the masthead.
Editor in Chief: Bill Simmons
Ouch. This may not end well.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 04:29 PM