The Best American Sports Writing 2008

In this exciting new collection, William Nack, veteran sportswriter and author of the classic Secretariat, honors the year’s finest sports journalism and thus upholds the tradition that began seventeen years ago, with David Halberstam at the helm. In these pages, you will find the most provocative, compelling, tragic, and triumphant moments in sports from 2007, captured by the knights of the keyboard who make sports come alive for us day after day, week after week, year after year.
Here you’ll find Paul Solotaroff’s excellent and uncompromising take on the neglect that a growing number of crippled NFL players continually face from the NFL players’ union. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “G-L-O-R-Y!” offers a rousing inside look at the pregame rituals of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders. A riveting online diary by Wright Thompson reveals a bleak and merciless landscape in China, which that country’s government would rather not have the world see during preparations for the Olympics.
Nack finds a place for the fascinating offbeat story as well as the sensational. Alongside Eli Saslow’s captivating article about an obscure seventeenth-century sport, similar to a giant rugby scrum, carried out in the streets of Kirkwall, Scotland, stands Franz Lidz’s “scoop of the year,” a controversial and rare look into the life of George Steinbrenner, baseball’s largest but recently most enigmatic figure.
This year’s collection marks another wonderful addition to “one of the most consistently satisfying titles in the Best American series” (Booklist).
Contributors include Scott Price, Rick Bragg, Gary Smith, J.R. Moehringer, and others.