writing Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

V. S. Naipaul on Writing
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."...

Coming Soon: The Best American Sports Writing 2013
Coming October 8 is The Best American Sports Writing 2013. Edited by J.R. Moehringer. Check out the table of contents over at series editor Glenn Stout's site. Looks to be another sure shot to this great long-running series. ...

Bud Shrake In The Land Of The Permanent Wave
Bryan Curtis wrote a nice story about Dan Jenkins, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, and their alma mater for Texas Monthly in 2008:...

A Conversation With Ron Rapoport
Best of Chicago: Westbrook Pegler on Babe Ruth's called shot | Wendell Smith on the White Sox in Jim Crow Florida | Bob Greene on a hockey "intellectual" | Skip Bayless on Harry Caray | John Schulian on the end of summer...

Typewriter Love
I know writers who still use a typewriter. One close pal whose neighborhood experiences power outages several times a year recently wrote a story on a portable. He wanted to get comfortable with it case he loses power and can't use his electric machine. ...

Fame And Obscurity
I found this over at Longform (and if you haven't bookmarked this site by now, whadda ya waiting for?)—Robert Draper's 1992 Texas Monthly story on Cormac McCarthy. I'm not drawn to McCarthy's writing but I'm a sucker for profiles of writers and this is a good one:...

Joseph Mitchell: My Ears Are Bent
Something good is this: John Schulian on Joseph Mitchell:...

Elmore Leonard Wrote Great Opening Lines. Here Are All Of Them.
Of course I've had Dutch Leonard on the brain since hearing the news that he died yesterday morning. So I called my pal John Schulian and consulted loyal Stacks reader Four Finger Wu, and we assembled a collection of the first lines of Leonard's novels....

Yeah, But How Does it Read?
Few years ago, Franz Lidz wrote a piece on former SI managing editor Gil Rogin for the New York Observer. ...

Legends Of The Fall
Fight fans as well as movie fans will enjoy this—George Kimball’s wonderful piece about Budd Schulberg’s memorial service back in the fall of 2009....

You Don't See A Fella Sliding Into Second Base And Breaking His Cigar
Before he became famous a broadcaster, Myron Cope was a terrific writer. Do yourself a favor and track down his compilation Broken Cigars. The title was taken from a conversation Cope once had over beers with Alex Hawkins, a journeyman football player who complained that baseball was losing its popu...

A History Of Violence
Dig Carlo Rotella’s 2008 Washtington Post Magazine profile of the novelist and screenwriter George Pelicanos:...

The Best Of The Best
Glenn Stout, series editor of The Best American Sports Writing has posted the table of contents for this year's edition on his website. The book, edited by J.R. Moehringer, won't be out for a few months, but I want to take this moment to celebrate Moehringer's selections....

In The Boom Boom Room
Dip over to Salon and dig the most gifted Jennifer Egan:...

Heaven Ain't What It Used to Be: Dick Young Goes To Hell
New York sportswriting legend Dick Young was a lot of different things. Among them, for reasons laid out in this classic Ross Wetzsteon profile, he was a man one could easily imagine having a great time filing his column from the depths of Hell. Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin ran with the conceit i...

Dick Young's America ... The Reactionary Who Changed Sportswriting ...
Originally published in the Aug. 1, 1985, issue of Sport magazine. Reprinted here with permission of the author's widow, Laura Ross....

The Art of Storytelling: John Hersey's Writing Seminar
Our man Peter Richmond wrote a wonderful piece over at the Nieman storyboard about John Hersey's senior-year writing seminar at Yale. ...

A Gentle Giant
Jack McCallum is a terrific reporter and writer. He was with SI for many years and still does the occasional piece for them. He is also an author and runs a blog. The blog has lots of fun posts. This one, a tribute to the late Robert Creamer, is tender:...

The Art of Storytelling: Joyce Carol Oates
From Open Culture, here's The Writing Life of Joyce Carol Oates:...