It didn't take long for the latest issue of the "The Year's Best Sports Writing" - an annual series that dates back a few decades in different forms and publishers - to be impressive.
As in, the introduction.
Guest editor Mirin Fader puts some early points by recounting her reaction to the news that the Washington Post was dropping its sports section: horror. You didn't have to live in Washington to be angry about that. A lot of experience and institutional knowledge about the Washington area, the country, and the sports world in general walked out the door when the Post gave up on sports.
On the other hand, though, it's not as if we shouldn't have seen something like this coming. You only needed to reach each year's choices in this series of books to realize the landscape of sports journalism has been changing over the years. Go back 40 years to when the Sporting News was handling this assignment, and most of the stories were from newspapers and magazines. Now their appearances have become somewhat few and far between, replaced by outlets that are relatively unknown to mainstream readers .
Fader writes in her introduction, "I wanted this edition of This Year's Best Sports Writing to be a love letter. I want people to fall back in love. I wanted reading this to feel like we used to feel when our favorite sports writer put out a piece, and everyone would comment on Twitter, 'Appointment reading,' or 'Blind retweet.'" There is some good writing out there; it's just getting difficult to find it.
There are 25 stories for the reader's consideration. The good news is that most of them are worthwhile. Last year's selections had a high percentage of efforts from out of the mainstream and was more hit-or-miss than most of the books in this series; that number dropped time around.
It's worth saying right at the start that there are a couple of patterns in the selections here that are interesting. The first is that Fader is a senior writer for the Athletic. Out of those 25 stories, seven are from the Athletic. That seems like a high percentage from a distance, although I have few complaints about the selections from that outlet. The second is that Fader is best known for her biographies of a couple of biographies of basketball players who grew up in the Eastern Hemisphere - Giannis and Hakeem. Therefore, some of the picks are not surprisingly international in tint.
My usual standard for determining the possibility of interest in a particular story comes from the answer to a question: Would this be in the sports section of a newspaper? Admittedly, some of the ones here wouldn't be. There's a story about a skier who ended up as a crime boss, a tale of a woman who took her motorcycle and criss-crossed Africa with it, a report on women who essentially hiked across the top of the Canadian Rockies. A restaurant review by a noted critic caught me by surprise, but could have used a little whimsy when in this company. I struggled with these quite a bit.
But there were plenty of other stories that carried me along. An old-fashioned profile of Cal Raleigh - "Big Dumper" - was nicely done. The dark side of sports betting as it affects the athletes themselves is eye-opening. Who knew that Robert Caro was the guiding unseen hand behind the rise of the Oklahoma City Thunder of the NBA? It was fascinating to see what happened to former Dolphins' lineman Jonathan Martin. The story about the after-effects of the deaths of hockey's Gaudreau is sometimes haunting.
Three of the stories stood out, and one was a natural for me. A 50-year anniversary of Ali-Frazier III is as good as could be hoped - a moment that probably stands around the peak of history of boxing interest. (Things haven't been the same since then.) It was a hanging curve ball that was slugged out of the park. A profile of Dale Earnhardt Jr., still trying to cope with the loss of his famous father, has tons of new information - at least to a non-NASCAR follower. But Tom Junod gets the "Best in Show" Award with a story about two high school quarterbacks who have much in common even though their tragic stories are 50 years apart. Junod asks all the right questions in this one, even we'll never be really comfortable with the answers.
You'll speed through the good stories and skim through the less interesting ones, which makes the 350-page length a little less intimidating. "The Year's Best Sports Writing 2026" has a very good batting average this time, and it's worth your time.
Four stars
Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon.com affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)
Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.
