The Best American Sports Writing and idealized sports journalism
My research project from the 2025 IACS Summit on Communication and Sport
In 1991, David Halberstam was the first guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing.
In his introductory essay, Halberstam wrote:
The job of the skilled sportswriter is to go where the cameras can’t go, to find out exactly what hungry readers who already know the outcome need to know, and to beat television at a story it thinks it has already covered. … There are so many other sportswriters on so many papers who are writing well, who have learned to break out of the old-fashioned form, slip inside the locker room, and give the reader an extra dimension of what has happened in a sport just witnessed by millions, and do it with some measure of literary grace.
If you’re looking for a definition of The Platonic Ideal of Sports Journalism, it’s pretty great. In fact, I could argue that that’s it in a nutshell.
Last week, I presented research I did into this at the 2025 IACS Summit on Communication and Sport in Chicago.
For this project, I did an analysis of 12 of the 34 guest-editor essays from the Best American Sports Writing/The Best Sports Writing series. I read and analyzed essays from the following years and writers:
I was specifically analyzing how they talked about the state of sports journalism. Many of the essays were not strictly about sports journalism. Most of them had long autobiographical stretches where they looked back on their careers and traced their lifelong interest in sports or sports writing. Dick Schaap’s was characteristically lovely, and David Maraniss wrote an incredibly warm tribute to his late father.
But for my purposes, I was interested in how these sports writers talked about sports writing and sports journalism itself.
Based on what these writers wrote in their essays, the ideal version of sports journalism is a deeply reported, well written story about a person or topic that goes beyond the day-to-day of sports.
As I found in research a decade ago, gamers and breaking news are not generally considered among the best in American sports writing. The best of the best sports writing, as chosen by the elite of the elite sports journalists, are most often pieces of longform reporting.
There’s plenty to critique in this idea, but let’s focus on some of the good in it.
These essays suggest that the Platonic Ideal is rooted in good, established journalism fundamentals. Fearlessly deep reporting. Good, clear, vibrant writing. An eye for an interesting story, no matter where it is. We already talked about Rick Reilly’s list a few weeks ago, but this is true time and again. And the stories in these anthologies are, almost without question, great. Here is a partial list from the 1997 edition alone:
Jon Krakauer, “Into Thin Air”1
David Foster Wallace, “The String Theory”
Gary Smith, “The Chosen One”
Gay Talese, “Ali in Havanna.” 2
The ideal, as defined here, are well-rounded stories that show the depth and the breadth of sports journalism. It shows, clearly, that sports journalism is not just The Toy Department of the newsroom. This was a dominant theme in the early essays, which makes sense given that the series was new and had to establish itself.
There’s a connection to the past, a kind of formal establishing of a sports journalism canon. Columnists Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Jim Murray are among the writers mentioned in more than one essay. Also often mentioned is Andre Laguerre, the legendary editor who essentially created the Sports Illustrated that so many of us grew up with and itself has become kind of a Platonic Ideal.3
But it’s not all ideal.
To start, there are a lot of white dudes both writing the essays, discussed in the essays, and who have their work featured. George Plimpton’s introductory essay in 1997 was just about the whitest thing I’ve ever read. But that is, sadly, reflective of the history of sports writing.
Then we come to technology. Here’s one quote, and it’s not from who you think it’s gonna be from:
My reasoning is that if print beats television by supplying good sports numbers (agate), and print can also supply good sports writing that television can’t, then print should emphasize good writing rather than dismissing it. I found, however, that, in the newspaper business, this is a decidedly minority view. The print medium seems almost embarrassed to go at its own pace, and more and more the sports pages are given over to breaking news to the exclusion of features.
This is from Frank Deford in 1993.
It’s noteworthy that this sentiment is from 32 years ago. The early 1990s are a time a lot of us look back on as a golden age of newspaper sports journalism. A lot of us in or adjacent to the industry would be thrilled to live and work in the sports journalism space Deford is lamenting.
This is a common theme in the essays when sports journalism is discussed. It used to be better. Back before all this modern technology messed things up. The technology changes with the era, from cable TV and talk radio in the early 1990s, to the internet, blogs, and ESPN.com in the mid 2000s, to social media in the early 2010s, but the vibe is always the same. Good journalism — the ideal type of journalism — is being suffocated out of the market.
The type of ideal sports journalism also sits within a larger sports media ecosystem that is ignored in these essays. The Platonic Ideal is presented as this type of journalism that stands alone and above the day-to-day stories. But those day-to-day stories – who won, who got traded, who got signed — are the foundation for and backbone of sports journalism. They provide the context needed for these bigger stories to hit as hard as they do.
The biggest critique of The Platonic Ideal is that it is WRITER CENTRIC. As described, this is a writer’s dream. Travel freely, report deeply, write long and lyrically. Everyone who’s a writer at heart would love these stories and advocate for them.
This is not a surprise. After all, this is an anthology with the word WRITING in its name. This is the Best American Sports Writing, not the Best American Sports Journalism. And yes, the two are interconnected, but there is still a difference.
The Platonic Ideal is one for writers: But what about for readers?
From Frank Deford in 1993:
Readers, on the other hand, almost never complained that our stories were too highbrow or too long or had too many words or what have you. In fact, readers were pretty laissez faire about the content of the whole paper.
Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Michael Wilbon wrote
Readers used to relish the long thoughtful profile and the 5,000-word Sunday “takeout” which have largely disappeared from the landscape.
But do they?
Some do, of course. But this is an assumption. And I don’t think it’s necessarily wise to bank on this ideal as a way to save sports journalism.
Which is one of the reasons this matters. From Jane McManus, the guest editor of the 2024 edition who was on the keynote panel at last week’s conference:4
This is a fraught time for sports journalism, as an industry and a practice.
Within the essays I read for this project, and connected to the introductory essays in The Athletic that inspired this presentation, there is an inherent suggestion that the Platonic Idea could be the one ring to rule them all. The vibe is, if only editors and owners and the powers that be stopped chasing the latest technological fad and focused on stories that fit the ideal, we could save sports journalism.
This is an example of boundary work. One of the defining features of media in the digital and social age is the idea that there is power in differentiating yourself from all of the other “content” that is out there. Focusing on the Platonic Ideal is one way to do that. Whether that is correct or not is a much larger issue.
From a broader perspective, understanding the Platonic Ideal of sports journalism helps us begin defining what journalists themselves see as being lost during a challenging era in sports journalism.
The original magazine piece his book is later based on.
Now, there’s an interesting discussion to be had that throughout the history of the anthology, a number of pieces dubbed “The Best Sports Writing” are not written by sports writers or sports journalists.
At last year’s IACS conference, I presented about Stanley Woodward and Jack Mann as the sports editors who helped create modern sports journalism. In doing this project, I realized Laguerre is absolutely one of those editors as well. Look for more on him in the future here.
When I submitted my abstract for this conference, I did not know that one of the series’ guest editors would be on the bill.
Remember that DeFord is coming off the back of The National failing. His invective may be sour grapes over not being able to make work a national (small n) sports-only daily newspaper with the biggest names in sports journalism. This was, of course, the era of 5th Avenue office, huge salaries, bigger expense accounts, and John Feinstein (may he rest in power) flying home on the company dime between the French Open and Wimbledon because his cat died.
That said, I still have a box of them in the basement from 1989. Heh.
This is a really interesting article Brian. I've always felt American sports journalism as an industry is very concerned with saying 'This is actually very important'. I agree it's very important but I think sometimes it loses sight of the fact that covering matches and regular news is just as important (and of more relevance to many readers).