Best sports stories of the past 20 years

Bill Nack's Secretariat story for SI is brilliant.

 

Damned Yankee

When ever people talking about writing leads I always think about that story and how ballsy / good you have to be to get away with it. I love how he directs the reader to look at the photo and how he was able to find something like the photo and revolve the lead/whole story around it.

"Everything you will read on the next 23 pages revolves around one photograph. The rest of the old man's past, you must understand, is all but gone. The framed baseball pictures were smashed by his hammer. The scrap thick with newspaper clippings was fed to the furnace in the basement of the Sears , Roebuck in Paramus, New Jersey. The trophies, with their figurines of ballplayers and eagles and angel-like women, were placed on a portable table in the middle of a ball field and annihilated, one a day, by the old man's rifle arm. Have you ever heard the popping sound an angel makes when it's struck by a fastball?"

note: This photo is the only one in Beyond the Game, though I wish their were more. Same goes for stories in BASW.

 

I forget who wrote it, but around 1990-91 in Sports Illustrated: The death of Willard Herschberger, the Reds catcher who killed himself in 1940.

Also, not that it was about the most joyful subject, but the post-Sept. 11 story in which Paul Tagliabue broke down for SI the decision-making that went into the NFL canceling that weekend's games.

 

I've always been a fan of Gary Smith's Mia Hamm piece from a couple of years ago (Everybody Knows Mia Hamm, Nobody Knows Mia Hamm)

 

Sirs, Madames,

Gary Smith's story about the tortured soul who was supposed to be Yogi Berra's successor.

And ...

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/cover/news/2000/04/14/smith_moment/

So much better with the photo I guess but unbelievably good.

YHS, etc

 

Wow, what a story. If most sports writers live to be 10,000 years old, they won't write as well. Amazing! F-ing Amazing!

 

William Nack wrote the piece on the death of Willard Herschberger. You can find it in one of Sports Illustrated's anthologies of baseball writing. It's called "The Razor's Edge." The ending will give you chills.