As its tenth birthday approaches, THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING is at the top of its game. In the past decade, it has been hailed as “a must for any sports fan” and “a venerable institution” and has showcased promising new talents along with Pulitzer Prize winners such as David Halberstam, Richard Ford, and John McPhee. With the 2000 edition, best-selling author and Emmy Award–winning sports journalist Dick Schaap continues this tradition of excellence by bringing together the finest sports writing to appear in the past year. These pieces will delight fans of all athletic endeavors, from football to fishing, from basketball to birdwatching. From more than 350 publications, Schaap has chosen essays that reach beyond the scores to the people and emotions behind the game. With a solid, self-assured, reliable veteran such as Dick Schaap compiling the lineup, the millennial edition of sports writing's best was bound to be a success, and it also includes a few surprises. You want baseball? Here's Robert Huber's stunning profile of Joe DiMaggio--no, not that Joe DiMaggio, but the troubled son saddled with the same name, but gifted with none of the talent. You want football? Here's former NFL defensive end Pat Toomay's deliciously jaundiced chronicle of working on Oliver Stone's football movie Any Given Sunday . You want eclectic? How about Mark Levine's profile of Tony Hawk, skateboarding's acknowledged grand master; Jeanne Marie Laskas on bull riding; Burkhard Bilger on cockfighting; and Bryan Burrough's harrowing account of the storm that wreaked havoc on the 54th Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race? They all widen the playing field that defines sports and sports writing. Now add to that selections from David Halberstam, Rick Telander, Craig Vetter, and Garrison Keillor, and the annual collection of The Best American Sports Writing finds itself once again leading the league. --Jeff Silverman "[These stories] allow readers to experience the moments of drama, poignancy, high emotion, and quiet reflection that sport can produce." (on THE BEST AMERICAN SPORTS WRITING 1999) Kirkus Reviews "Rewarding, informative, and frequently quirky." The Arizona Daily Star Glenn Stout is a writer, author, and editor, and served as series editor of The Best American Sports Writing, and founding editor of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. He is also the author of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid , Fenway 1912 , Nine Months at Ground Zero, and many other award-winning and best-selling books. He also served as a consultant on the Disney+ film adaptation of Young Woman and the Sea . Stout lives in Lake Champlain in Vermont. Introduction I bring certain credentials to this guest editorship. I always had an eye for athletic talent, and I knew from an early age that I did not have that talent. I did not have the speed, strength, or hand-and-eye coordination I needed to be a great baseball, basketball, or football player, or a good one. I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter. When I was fourteen, I began writing a sports column for a weekly newspaper called the Freeport (New York) Leader. I think I was paid five dollars a column. I have recently reread some of those pieces. I think I was overpaid. My column was called “Spanning theSports Scene” alliteration was my strong suit and one of my early efforts began (typically, I’m afraid), “The local football season is about to open with a bang! Two of the local titans, Hempstead and Freeport, clash ...” In subsequent columns, the prose did not markedly improve. When I was fifteen, I went to work for a daily newspaper, the Nassau Daily Review-Star. I was in high school. My boss was Jimmy Breslin, who became a Pultizer Prizewinning columnist. Jimmy was the night sports editor, and he was twenty years old. He was in college. You can imagine how good a newspaper it was. At first I covered only my own high school’s games. I started by phoning in results. Then I began going to the office and writing the game stories. My weaknesses included an inability to type. I hunted and pecked with one finger. I took hours to write a story two or three paragraphs long. As my typing improved, I was given more responsibility. I wrote about other high schools’ games. I worked four nights a week, four hours a night, for a dollar an hour. I became the paper’s resident horse- racing handicapper, even though I was not old enough to go to the track. I picked five winners one day. One night, in the infancy of my career, I went to work, and Breslin had written a script for me. He told me I was to call Fred McMorrow at the Long Island Press, which was then a sister paper to the Review- Star, and I was to repeat his words to McMorrow with feeling and precisely as he had written them. I did as I was told. “Mr. McMorrow,” I said when I reached him on the phone, “my name is Dick Schaap and I am fifteen years old and I am working in the sports department at the Nassau Daily Review-Star, and when Mr. Breslin came in to work