A lot of people like sports.Think of the best sports books of all time, come at a point where the fates of all involved are concrete. One of the greatest sports books of all time is Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Light’s, the athletic fates of the ’88 Permian Panthers are already decided by the time the book was released. There’d be no sudden turn toward athletic stardom for Boobie. For his story to end in a redemptive comeback, one where Boobie’s knee mystically regenerates and he takes his place on Sundays, mowing down linebackers by the dozen, would destroy all the underlying thematic relevance of the story. Permian wouldn’t be a destructive mill stone that grinds and pressures the young players into the ground, it’d be a town whose hard work, and tough nose attitude leads to players who thrive in the glitzy glamor of the NFL.We are all fans, like attention sports.
The best sports writing grapples humanly with an idea, something beyond the sports itself that isn’t reliant of the sandy structure of current sports. That’s the aim of my sports writing in this blog. In writing about a particularly harsh loss to the Indiana Pacers in an earlier post, I didn’t mean to overvalue the significance of the single game, but to get to the core of how a big comeback develops, the telltale signs of a crumbling lead, and the psychology that frames both a fan and a player in the moments of a back sided loss.
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