The fifth annual offering in this series edited by Stout features stories selected by Jenkins (You Gotta Play Hurt, 1991, etc.), this year's editor, and as usual, the results are mostly impressive. Looking back with the talented writers whose work festoons this volume, one quickly is reminded that 1994 was a dismal year for sports: the major-league baseball strike, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Jennifer Capriati's brush with the law and drug rehab, O.J. Simpson's arrest. Not surprisingly, the generally ugly tone of the year in sports is reflected in a volume dominated by these unpleasant topics. Jenkins mercifully only includes one piece on the O.J. trial, a brutal concoction by James Ellroy that is as savage and bleak in tone as any of that estimable neo-noir author's novels. It was a bad year for humor, judging from the contents of this collection, which is bookended by two excruciatingly unfunny pieces by Bob Verdi (on the baseball strike) and Ian Thomsen (on TonyaGate). The highs and lows of the collection are amply demonstrated in the book's foreword and introduction, respectively, a heartfelt tribute to a little-known black writer by Stout and a sour, mean-spirited diatribe against intellectuals who write on sports by Jenkins. Once you are past Jenkins, however, there is a multiplicity of rewards here. Particularly worthy are Dave Kindred's visit with Ted Williams, shortly after the great hitter's stroke; Gary Smith's superb reporting on a gathering of most of the world's living record-holders in the mile; and Gary Cartwright's recollection of a vanished high school football legend from his hometown. This book proves once again that although sports may be falling apart under the relentless pressure of corporate meddling, greed, drugs, racism, and the rest of the real world, sportswriters are still reporting that downfall with keen intelligence and art.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-70070-1
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flawed look at America's 1996 Olympic-champion women's basketball team. In 1896, the man known as the ``father of the modern Olympic games,'' Pierre de Coubertain, declared that the ``Olympics should be an exaltation of male athleticism'' with ``female applause as the reward.'' A century later, the members of the US women's basketball team earned an Olympic gold medal, distinction as the US Olympic Committee's ``team of the year,'' and money from endorsements or from contracts with one of two new pro leagues. Sportswriter Corbett does a passable job of dramatizing how women's basketball, like its big-money men's counterpart, has become a pressure cooker due to the demands placed by sponsors on players and coaches to win and to legitimize the sport. Although the author had exclusive access to the team during the year leading up to the Atlanta games, she divulges little about the players that the glut of magazine articles, television programs, or even sporting-goods marketers' press releases haven't already revealed. Thus, wedged in among her perceptive discussions of elite-level international basketball, the intricate plans (and deceits) of sports marketers, or how the women manage to integrate their personal and professional lives, we also get numerous trifling profiles of courage (a common story: overcoming low self-esteem from being tall). Also, Corbett offers too little discussion of the physiological effects of high-level athletic performance on women (for instance, what to make of evidence suggesting that basketball exacts a harsher toll on women's knees). Perhaps the sheer fact that this book is being published, and that the story has been covered from so many angles, is proof that the time is ripe for women's professional team sports to be taken seriously. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48682-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the promising title, not much dirt—but plenty of dust—arises from this thorough but dull study of the marriage between the two American obsessions of money and sports. The first volume of two on the subject (the second to be written by other authors), this covers the player-reserve clause, free agency, salary structures, franchises, tax shelters, stadium and arena construction, and the effect of rival leagues on the business of sports. All four major professional team sports- -baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—are included, but the focus is on baseball, the oldest and wealthiest of the lot ($1.35 billion in annual revenues). Echoing other recent books on the subject, most notably Andrew Zimbalist's far more exciting Baseball and Billions (p. 912), the authors contend—with an arsenal of charts as backup—that free agency works as well as the old reserve system (under which each team ``owned'' its players) at keeping a competitive balance between teams; that owners are making a mint these days; and that the spoils of free-agency go to the superstars. More unusual is their contention—again backed by reams of statistics—that the popular belief that ticket prices are rising to keep pace with player salaries is, in fact, an inversion of the truth: Actually, increased gate revenues have paved the way for the jump in salaries. There's much more: teams as tax shelters; the history of rival leagues (e.g., the old American Football League), which usually go defunct but force expansion nonetheless; and so on. All this bears fruit on occasion, but the authors ignore their pledge to write ``with a general audience in mind,'' and load their text with jargon (``brute force data accumulation,'' etc.) and complex mathematical formulae. Makes the sports pages read like the stock pages. (Twenty-four halftones and thirty-three line illustrations.)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-691-04255-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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