Why Sports Literate?
The answer’s in my back pages.
In the 1970s, my brother Tim and I shared a subscription to the Sports Illustrated Book Club, which worked like the Columbia Record Club. We received our first few books at a discount, then had to send in a reply card each month or else we would be sent the monthly selection at full price.
One of the best books we received was “Life on the Run,” a memoir by Bill Bradley about part of one season with the New York Knicks. Bradley, who played college ball at Princeton and delayed his entry to the NBA for two years so he could study at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, gave a very thoughtful account of life inside the NBA bubble.
Two other books we got from the club were written by Knicks players: Walt Frazier’s “Rocking Steady” and Jerry Lucas’ “The Memory Book,” co-authored with Harry Lorayne, a system for forming word associations to memorize things. (Yes, the Knicks are my team.)
The system enabled me to do the high school equivalent of a party trick—memorizing pages of Sports Illustrated magazine. I’d hand my friends an issue and ask them to pick out a page, and without looking I would tell them the contents of that page. (Thanks to this routine, my high school nickname became “Jerry Lucas.”)
The SI book club also introduced me to Jim Bouton’s ground-breaking baseball memoir, “Ball Four,” as well as Robert Creamer’s Babe Ruth book, “Babe: The Legend Comes to Life.”
I wasn’t smart enough to hang onto that book collection as I moved into adult life, but I’ve since reacquired many of the volumes.
Developing my sports literacy
George: “I have nothing to say to anybody. I'm so uninteresting. I think I'm out of conversation.”
Jerry: “So why are you calling me six times a day?”
George: “All I know about is sports. That's it. No matter how depressed I get, I could always read the sports section.”
Jerry: “I could read the sports section if my hair was on fire.”
Seinfeld, Season 3, Episode 4 – “The Dog”
I didn’t quite go full George Costanza and read nothing but sports as I grew older, but the sports aisle is always my first stop in a book store.
In my 30 years as a writer and editor at The Buffalo News, one of my favorite assignments was writing a column called Mixed Media, which touched on print, broadcast and online media. The column I enjoyed the most was when I polled an assortment of local and national media figures about their favorite sports books. The column is linked here.
(For the record, the books that received multiple recommendations in the column were: “Semi-Tough,” by Dan Jenkins, “Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich,” by Mark Kriegel, “Moneyball,” by Michael Lewis, “Friday Night Lights” by H.G. Bissinger, “The Bronx Zoo,” by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock, “Season on the Brink,” by John Feinstein, and “Ball Four.”)
After 50 years of collecting and consuming sports media, I decided to launch this site to take deep (or medium) dives into classics of the genre, as well as highlight new releases.
This is not a book review site. There are other good places to find those, including my friend Budd Bailey’s Sports Book Review Center. Some of the articles in this space will be review-ish, as George Santos might say, but I’ll more often do feature stories on sports books, including author Q&A’s. I will draw inspiration from Literary Hub, which does great online content about books, as well as The Ringer, Slate’s sports section and other outlets that value good writing.
Thanks for spending some of your hard-earned minutes here.
