March 18, 2010

Dear Leslie,

This semester the sports writing class I teach is reading and analyzing some of the best American sports writing from 2009. One story is about a runner who had a degenerative condition in his left leg that made it impossible for him to continue running as he got older. He was a physician who had been a runner in college and met his wife running. Running was so intrinsic to him that he had the bottom of his leg amputated so a prosthetic device could allow him to run marathons.

Another story tells of an Arab woman in Georgia who organized a bunch of poor young African war refugees into a soccer team called the Fugees. She herself is a refugee from a life of wealth and high expectations.

Another story is about smugglers who traffic in Cuban baseball players.

Sports are only superficially about the outcome of a game. Sports have meaning beyond the score or none of us would care so much.

Every summer from age 10 to 18 I suited up twice a week to play organized baseball. I wasn't good, but glory wasn't the treasure baseball held for me. Part of the treasure was a sweetness epitomized by the joy in the way Willie Mays played. "Willie Mays' glove is where triples go to die," wrote Jim Murray, one of my favorite sports writers.

Another part of the treasure was the drama in almost every game, each one a nine-act play. When I was 11 the duel between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth's home-run record was more important to me than almost anything. JFK was assassinated two years later. Things change.

In the intervening years, some of the sweetness has been soured by strikes, obscene greed and steroid revelations. But the game itself, the game of batting and pitching and catching between the chalk lines, remains sweet.

My students are learning how to cover basketball games and baseball games, how to interview coaches and players and how to make sense of statistics. These days it won't hurt for them to know their way around the courts -- the legal kind. But I also want them to learn that these are the nuts and bolts of more meaningful stories.

So much in professional and collegiate sports today depends on filling seats and, in the case of colleges, attracting donations and students. My students are onto that. One, a male, wrote recently about the disparity in media coverage between men's and women's sports. Others are working on longer stories about how the university markets its sports and the effects of so-called "money games," in which a small university sacrifices its win-loss record and sometimes its athletes in games against much larger universities in exchange for a big check.

The college basketball season is climaxing just as professional baseball players are working out in spring training. Analysts are predicting which basketball teams have the best chance of making it to the Sweet 16 and which baseball teams have the pitching and hitting to make the playoffs next fall. It's fodder, and fodder counts. But the real stories are in the dramas those teams have lived through and in the sweetness of a bat hitting a ball.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.