Is deadline writing no longer good enough for BASW?

So, at one time, when it included deadline writing, it was compiled with something else in mind?

If Bob's right, it's a 100/0 ratio. It strikes me as an anomaly, that it could be that level of ratio annually based on something as basic as "hypothetical reader preference."

Hey, 80/20 and I don't blink an eye. I'm not naive. I'm struck by, if it's accurate, the annual ratio.

 

I'm not unsympathetic to the notion here that a more comprehensive BASW-type book would give the reader a nice survey of the year in sports, through the year's sports writing. It would include, for example, the Deadspin Manti Te'o long-form piece along with, say, a deadline piece about LeBron finally breaking through for a title. It'd be an interesting approach. I'd like to see someone try it.

 

It's purple as hell, but that was also 40 years ago.
He aimed high, anyway.

 

In the 70s and 80s, the anthology, I believe put out by the Sporting News, included a lot of deadline pieces and newspaper stories. It ceased publishing, I presume because of lack of sales.

In 1990, Houghton Miflin reached out to Stout to see if he'd be interested in editing a collection of the year's best writing about sports. Stout asked Halberstam to be the guest editor and after reading through a series of stories Stout sent him, Halberstam said, roughly, there is no book here. Sorry. Months later, he reconsidered, picking almost entirely longform pieces, and the series has published and sold relatively well for nearly 25 years.

To review, Halberstam and Stout made a decision that made the series financially viable again. Under the old model, it did not sell well enough to continue. And this was in the 80s! Before the Internet!

I think instead of speaking in the abstract, we should talk more in terms of what should have been included. The Wetzel pieces. That's a start. What else? And if your answer is "Well, I don't remember a specific piece, but I'm sure there were some..." then that says a lot about how memorable those pieces were, doesn't it?

 

Looking through the back of the book - cheating, in other words - I thought that the Ariel Levy New Yorker piece on Steubenville was tremendous. To channel YankeeFan a little bit here, there was an established narrative about that story, and she blew it up.

 

OK, but obviously not a deadline piece in The New Yorker. I think that's what we're talking about for the moment, not pieces that should have made it but didn't.

 

Gotcha. I was speed reading posts, the modern-day cigarette break.

 

Here, for example, is Judy Battista, on deadline, writing about the Giants upset of the Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. The stress and intensity of this gamer must have been enormous. This is about as clean and poised and artfully structured as you can expect someone to write when they might have 30 mins, sitting at their keyboard, in-between running down to try and get quotes and catching the elevator and fighting upstream through a sea of reporters all trying to do the same thing. It is a perfect example of Battista's deadline skills. She is a pro's pro.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/sports/football/04game.html

Would you put it in Best American Sports Writing?

As a sportswriter, you might recognize the degree of difficulty. The way she could be counted on in a big moment. Because you'd know how hard it was to write this clean, this tight, on deadline for an audience of millions.

But let's say I'm reading this six months after the Super Bowl. Does anything stand out that makes me think: Wow, that's one of the best things I read all year?

 

When Charlie Einstein edited the Baseball Reader, he had all sorts of pieces in there, from huge takeouts to poems to deadline writing, which he called spot reporting, a term I believe is more descriptive. Just was browsing it this weekend. ALL of the spot reporting stories were still engrossing reading. Red Smith on Bobby Thomson's homer, Heywood Broun on the 1923 World Series, etc. These were about games which predate me. No one form of journalism inherently produces better writing, in terms of being better reading, than another form.
The extreme difficulty of deadline writing should be recognized when evaluating it. I used to say that the APSE awards for writing should be divided into categories by how long the author had to do it, and I was only half joking.

 

re: Battista ... can't remember if we've had this discussion before. But the first graf could have been written beforehand in a just-in-case scenario. Or maybe she wrote it at halftime when it became apparent the game would go down to the wire.

Doesn't mean it's bad or unworthy of praise but it reads a bit generic.

 

Reads rehearsed.

 

I was with a guy at Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS who had his "Cubs go to the World Series" lede written for 20 years. He cut and pasted it into his gamer in the eighth.