The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind. The Best American Sports Writing 2005 includes Michael Lewis • Gary Smith • Steve Coll • Tom Verducci • Ira Berkow • Bill Plaschke • Linda Robertson • Michael Bamberger • L. Jon Wertheim • Thomas McGuane • John Brant • Pat Jordan • David DiBenedetto • and others Mike Lupica, guest editor, has been a columnist for the New York Daily News since 1977 and is the best-selling author of numerous books, including, most recently, Travel Team, a number one New York Times bestseller. 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 This all really started for me back in the late 1960s when I was a junior at Bishop Guertin High School, writing about my high school teams for the Nashua (New Hampshire) Telegraph, getting paid five dollars for the stories once Mike Shalhoup, the editor of the paper, convinced me it was a much better idea to start double-spacing them. Of course, this was before I had the only kind of job I ever wanted, writing a sports column in New York, which is the job that had me sitting in Fenway Park when Bucky Dent hit his home run against the Red Sox on October 2, 1978. And sitting in Lake Placid the night Herb Brooks’s hockey team beat the Russians. And watching Kirk Gibson’s ball fly out of Dodger Stadium one World Series night in 1988. It is the job that has given me a front row seat to everything else I have seen, all the way to the Red Sox coming back from three games down to beat the Yankees last fall. When the ball that Gibson hit went out of the ballpark that night, the great Jack Buck made this unforgettable call: “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Nobody believed what they saw in the 2004 American League Championship Series after the Yankees were ahead three games to none. I have always said that, for me, nothing could ever top Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig and what they did in that rink in Lake Placid the night Al Michaels asked if we all believed in miracles. And I still don’t think anything ever will. But watching the Red Sox come back that way against the Yankees, no matter which way you were rooting, was pretty good for the silver medal. I got paid to write about that Olympic team and got paid to write about the Yankees versus the Red Sox. I once told Jimmy Breslin that I liked doing what I was doing so much I would do it for free. Breslin snapped, “This isn’t the Lawn Tennis Association. We don’t just play for the love of the game.” Believe me, the point was well taken. But really, from the time I was a teenager, the only life I ever imagined for myself, at least professionally, was writing about sports. My dreams about that did not begin with the Nashua Telegraph. More than anything, they really began in the 1960s, when I tore through my copy of Sports Illustrated as soon as it arrived in our mail on a Friday, wanting to see what Dan Jenkins was writing about college football or golf or even skiing and to read any of the other star writers they had at the time. More than anything else the magazine and its writers were doing in those days, they were expanding the possibilities. And making kids like me want to somehow figure out a way to do what they were doing. For me it started with Jenkins, who I believe did more to invent modern sports writing than anybody alive. It doesn’t mean there weren’t tremendous sports columnists in the newspaper business when I was growing up. There were, there are. My friend Bob Ryan, from the Boston Globe, is a classic American sports columnist and would have been a star, I believe, in any era. Later in my career I would discover the pure, clear genius of W. C. Heinz, one of the best sports columnists of all time for the old New York Sun, and also a storied war correspondent for that paper who traveled across Europe during World War II with his old Remington typewriter and the First Army. In the 1950s, Heinz would come home and write what is still, for my money, the best sports novel ever written, The Professional. Red Smith was another of my heroes, not just because of the way he could write, but because of the elegant way he went the distance in this business, writing like a total star almost until the day he di