ROCKLAND, Maine—The New Hampshire/Maine split on I-95 in Portsmouth, N.H., is unpredictable. Sometimes you’re able to breeze through to your final destination—back to your shit hole of a dorm room in Durham, or off to the Kittery Trading Post to buy a crossbow and a bottle of deer piss—but other times you’re forced to…
The splashiest piece of sportswriting in my lifetime might be David Foster Wallace’s 2006 profile of Roger Federer, printed in the New York Times’s short-lived Play magazine. A wrinkled copy of it lived under my old Xbox console for years, so that I knew exactly where to revisit it. At the time, the essay felt…
The End of the Tour, a drama about a five-day interview/road trip that took place between novelist David Foster Wallace and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky in 1996, has already received significant pushback from those closest to the late author, who committed suicide in 2008. Wallace’s estate announced in April it…
It's Wimbeldon time again, a good moment to revisit David Foster Wallace's celebrated 2006 New York Times story on Roger Federer:
David Foster Wallace's 2006 Times Magazine profile of Roger Federer is one of sports journalism's most famous write-arounds. Or, as Wallace wrote himself, the piece was "a spectator’s experience of Federer, and its context." But the Times flew Wallace out to Wimbledon, so surely he got to spend some time with Federer,…
The late author's profile, written for the now-defunct Play, "constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject" that "still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level," according to the Grantland introduction provided by Michael MacCambridge.
A quick primer on SportsFeat: Every day, we post great sports writing from across the web, both new stuff and classics. A companion to Longform.org, the site is designed to be used with services like Instapaper and Read It Later, so you can read the stories later on your phone, iPad or Kindle. You can find our picks…
When David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest was published in 1996, the publicity-shy author was catapulted into the literary spotlight and heralded as the heir to Thomas Pynchon. The thousand-plus page novel—whose plot is vastly sprawling and fantastic but essentially revolves around a lethally addictive…
Because no one reads the newspaper, and SportsCenter's anchors are too perky for this early in the morning, Deadspin combs the best of the broadsheets and the blogosphere to bring you everything you need to know to start your day.
"Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer," Philippe Bouin tells Cynthia Gorney of The New York Times Magazine for this week's cover story. "But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different."
Sigh. Columbia's New York Review of Magazines has a lengthy look at the "the short, happy, tragic life" of Play, the Times' much-beloved sports magazine and, for my money, sportswriting's last good shot.
Before we get started, I'd like to say something about David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace, Illinois' own, is the best writer I've ever read who I found completely unreadable. I don't mean his non-fiction stuff that had the benefit of editors who, strangely, had a desire for people who read their magazine to…
Like many aspiring professional typists, I was curious about David Foster Wallace and admired him for his prodigious writing talent, even though I found a huge portion of his writing indecipherable. (I've read the first 22 pages of "Infinite Jest" many, many times, but never past that point. ) Friday night Wallace had…
