What is the ultimate goal of sportswriting? Is it to inform the reader, to tell them something that they might not know about a given team or player? Is it to give a certain flavor to events that have happened, to be the Vin Scully to a million Kirk Gibsons-in-waiting? Or is it to elevate sports, which can so often devolve into rote recapitulation of games, of numbers and scores that blend into each other, to something akin to art, to capture what is ephemeral and special and beautiful in this thing that we choose to devote so much of our time to?
It is with that dilemma in mind, that I want to talk about the best piece of sportswriting that I have ever read: David Foster Wallace’s ode to Roger Federer, published in the New York Times in 2006. It is perhaps ironic that in the face of such a beautiful piece of writing, there are no words to describe its brilliance. It is, quite frankly, genius. And it is utterly unsurprising.
The literary world lost a titan when it lost David Foster Wallace. There will never be another writer with his singular command of the highbrow and the lowbrow; the only man who could make an eight-line sentence that was ultimately one very intellectual poop joke appear as normal as any other sentence that he wrote. ‘Infinite Jest’ is one of my favourite books. ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ is my favorite short story collection. ‘Federer as Religious Experience’ is my favorite piece of sportswriting. I read it once every year, just to remember what there is to aspire to in this field.
“These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.” This is a sentence that causes you to pause with your eyes protruding, wondering how the sheer joy of watching genius in action could be captured. Brian Eno once said about the Velvet Underground that “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies (of their self-titled debut album) started a band.” The same is true of Foster Wallace; everyone who has ever read him has tried, on some level, to imitate the inimitable. Hell, the entire first paragraph of this column is what I would charitably term as a god-awful Foster Wallace impression. And when you read his sports work, you realize why people engage in facsimiles of his writing.
Because his writing cares; it never deigns to pat the reader on the head for making a simple statement about sports. It cares about sports so deeply that it would never dare reduce itself to platitudes about ‘guts’ and ‘heart’ and ‘winners;’ it rewards deep thinking on the part of the reader because its author would never dare to think about sports anything less than deeply. This is sportswriting at its finest.
“For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations.” You could show this sentence to someone who had grown up in a nuclear bunker and they would have a picture of Nadal, sweat glistening under a blazing French sun, primal in ways that Federer and his seemingly effortless grace could never hope to attain. I could endeavor to reduce this to its linguistic building-blocks, but that would be pointless. The words speak for themselves.
Not many people grow up wanting to be Vin Scully, to be Don Cherry, to be Martin Tyler (shout-outs to my Premier League fans). In the annals of childhood, everyone is Kirk Gibson rounding the bases or Big Shot Rob with the deep three. Yet, everyone one of those memories comes with an associated descriptive voice, someone narrating what otherwise would just be drama occurring in silence. There is no sport without the commentator and the sportswriter.
And so we return to the question of what is the sportswriter’s ideal? Is it to be loved? No, that’s too easy; just write some fluff pieces about the team you’re covering. Is it to be hated? I’m pretty sure Skip Bayless has that covered. No, it is to elevate, to give to the athletes something that underscores their actions, to create drama where there is none and highlights it when it exists. Would we remember Gibson as fondly if we didn’t have Jack Buck yelling, “I don’t believe what I just I saw!” because in that moment he was just as shocked as the viewers at home must have been?
“It’s the passionate machismo of southern Europe versus the intricate clinical artistry of the north.” Yeah, that’s the spot, David. If I ever write something half as good as that, I’ll make sure to remember Federer and to remember the greatest piece of sportswriting I’ve ever seen.
Dylan Fugel’s editor got very annoyed de-Britishifying all of his “favourites” and “endeavours.” Teach Fugel how to spell at dfugel ‘at’ stanford.edu.