Where have all the sports books gone?

Yes, spot on! Add those to the four-part doc on CBC (which was very good). And of the Summit Series books I read last year, the best one was this one:

 

Those crickets are deafening.

 

Which may have just gotten more interesting.

Las Vegas police search home in connection to Tupac Shakur murder - CBS News

 

1. It's hard to multi-task when reading text, and phone culture has convinced we always need to be doing 2-3 things at once.

2. The insights/personal details sports writers may have once provided are often supplied by the athletes themselves at this point. What could we know - that we'd also want to know - about LeBron or Steph or (God help us) Aaron Rodgers that we don't?

3. Since roughly 2013/2014 - the real rise of Twitter - we've been in a real political moment. Too much of it. Crowds out other stuff. How much great music has there been in the last 8 years? How much great TV (really think about it) in the last 8? How much great TV?

4. There is great writing out there. There is. How much of it is in sports books? I can think of a few. But how much of sports writing has turned into a bottomless pit of detail after detail after detail without perspective? Moneyball ripped through the universe because it was different, controversial, challenging to the ideological status quo at the time. What would challenge the ideological status quo of this moment?

 

Jonathan Eig started out with bios of Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, but two of his last three bios have been Capone and a recently-released one on MLK.

 

What was an anecdote book is now a 42-slide listicle on Facebook that you never finish because some pop-up ad resets the whole thing on item 27.

I think those tended to be impulse buys for people browsing the sports section at the bookstore. And now browsing in the bookstore is itself on the endangered species list.

 

Capone's enduring stay in pop culture fascinates me. A couple years ago Tom Hardy was excellent as Capone in a movie that might have been one of the most deeply depressing films you'll ever see - sad, boring, ponderous. I'm surprised there's more to say about the guy.

 

I was about to say. Maybe because I'm a degenerate is why the first thought when I saw "sports books" was Vegas.

 

One of the more intense and scary books I've read lately is "Playing Through The Pain," a biography of Ken Caminiti by Dan Good.

 

+1.
Second thought was the sports-talk radio stations I listen to wouldn't be able to pay their light bills without the advertising.
EDIT: Or, now that I think of it, fill out their quarter hours.