I once described to a writing teacher the type of sports writing I like best as “writing about sports that isn’t really about sports.” Which is to say, I care less about the beat-reporter details — who won, who lost, scores and standings — and more about the larger ideas that sports give us access to, ideas of culture and class and the negotiation of mortality. The kind of things that compose what more artful folk call “the human condition,” though in journalism circles is relegated to “human interest stories.”
One of my earliest guides to sports writing was the show Real Sports, which aired one episode every month on HBO. Each episode was an hour long, with a handful of segments about the world of sports beyond the final scores. They were deeply researched, thoroughly reported and diverse in subject matter. One segment might cover the intersection of mixed martial arts and politics in Chechnya, another might take the audience into the world of Iditarod dogs, while another would go into the physics and ethics of using pine tar in baseball. No matter the topics, you’d always walk away from an episode having learned something, and with a new perspective to consider. That is how I want readers to feel after finishing something I’ve written, whether it’s about sports or education or housing policy.
After 29 years, Real Sports aired its last episode in December 2023, so I’m late with this eulogy. Most of the RIP pieces written about the show bemoan its dogged investigative ethos and adversarial stance against the powerful, and rightfully so: that’s what journalism is meant to be, but increasingly is not. What I’ll miss most, though, is its resistance to narrow definitions of sport, its willingness to tell whatever story it wanted and treat it with the same earnest respect, no matter how journalistically urgent the story was or wasn’t.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of authenticity, what makes something “real.” (It’s what the Kendrick Lamar song above is about, and where the title of this post is from.) It’s an idea I still grapple with, especially as it relates to the cynicism and hopefulness that tend to bookend my outlook on the world; the natural feeling I have that my cynical perspectives are realer, smarter, more honest and insightful than my hopeful ones. I have to fight that inclination, and remind myself frequently that hopefulness and happiness are just as valid and honest and authentic as any other emotion I feel, and if anything, they are often much more productive.
One thing, I think, that makes a person or a piece of art authentic is exactly what Real Sports did in casting a wide net for the stories it told: recognizing the validity of all stories without compromising an intolerance for bullshit.
Here are some of my favorite pieces of sports writing over the years. They are all about a sport—sumo, tennis, baseball, basketball, boxing—but also much more.
The Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips
Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Greg Maddux by Jeremy Collins
Learn to Dunk by Michael McKnight
Why I Fixed Fights by Charles Farrell (this was anthologized in The Bittersweet Science, which might be my favorite book of sports writing)
Reads from Jan/Feb
How Will The Golden Age of “Making It Worse” End? by David Roth, Defector
The Jump Humping Handbook for Dummies by Ryan Habermeyer, Necessary Fiction
In The Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit, London Review of Books
This after this after this by Luke O’Neil, Substack
A tech billionaire is quietly buying up land in Hawaii. No one knows why by Dara Kerr, NPR
Books from Jan/Feb
The Book of Explanations by Tedi Lopez Mills, translated by Robin Myers
Blackboard: A Personal History of the Classroom by Lewis Buzzbee
Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, translated by Glenn Anderson
Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery by Richard Selzer
What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali
Conjunctions and Disjunctions by Octavio Paz, translated by Helen Lane
What I’ve Been Watching/Listening To
Since I don’t have any new writing to share — a trend I hope to reverse soon — I’ll use this last section to briefly discuss some of the movies, shows and music that have been occupying my time.
Andrea and I saw Poor Things (directed by Yorgos Lanthimos) and Lisa Frankenstein (Zelda Williams) in theaters, which would make for a good essay topic on feminism and Frankenstein-ism, but I’ll simply say that Poor Things was a visually beautiful film that refused to explore the world that made its story interesting, and Lisa Frankenstein was a surprisingly fun movie that leaned into its absurdities. Poor Things is a more ambitious piece of art—and Emma Stone’s performance was exceptional—but it could learn from its less serious counterpart.
We also watched Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, Amazon Prime), which had the raw materials of a good film—strong performances from good actors, a beautiful set with well-crafted cinematography—but fumbled the story in a handful of critical ways that made the whole thing a wash in my opinion. Skip it. Watch Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, HBO) instead, which is deserving of its five star reputation. (I only recommend Yojimbo here because I happened to watch it in February; there’s not much else in common between it and Saltburn.)
The Netflix “live-action” Avatar: The Last Airbender miniseries is fine, significantly better than the attempt at a “live-action” movie years ago, since it basically follows the story from the original animated series to a tee. But that’s also its flaw: if all it does is what has already been done—and not as well as it was done before—why does it even exist? Watch the animated version, also on Netflix. (I put “live-action” in quotes because as realistic as CGI effects are now, I can’t say they’re functionally any more “live” than cartoon animation.)
I’ve been jamming this 1978 ode to my hometown by Nohelani Cypriano. Since Andrea and I saw Bad Bunny last week, here are my two favorite songs from his most recent album: FINA and HIBIKI. Peetah Morgan, lead singer of reggae group Morgan Heritage, died last month, so here’s my favorite track of theirs that also happens to be good advice: