Sporting Madness

I was reading Gary Smith's fantastic, tear-jerking piece entitled "The Wheels of Life" in my most recent Sports Illustrated magazine today, and it got me thinking. The piece is a superb tale of Dick Hoyt and his paralyzed son, Rick, and how they've worked together to compete in everything from marathons to triathlons for over 30 years. On one level, it's a great story of two people who have overcome incredible adversity to do things that many able-bodied people never will be able to, but I think there's a broader point there as well, and one that applies to our current sports world. Read this paragraph and see if you can figure out where I'm going with this: Race day came a few days later. So closeted were the disabled in 1977 that many people, including Dick before the birth of his first son, had never laid eyes on a wheelchair or a quadriplegic, let alone one in a five-mile race. Dick's two other sons, Rob and Russ, wisecracked that the Hoyts'...

Today was Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day in the U.S.), so I've been doing a lot of reflecting on soldiers, wars and history. Ryan Gallivan has a good round-up of some excellent reading for the day, including this tremendous piece from Matt Ufford of Kissing Suzy Kolber fame on his experiences in Iraq, so I encourage you to check that out. However, there's one other story that always comes to my mind around now, and it's one that truly deserves to be remembered. If you haven't yet, I urge you to read Gary Smith 's excellent stories on former Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman . If you have read them, go back and look at them again; they're well worth it. Tillman gave up a lucrative career in the NFL to go serve his country in the wake of the September 11 attacks and tragically lost his life doing so. What impressed me even more than his decision, though, was the outstanding person he was from all accounts. I love these pieces because Smith doesn...

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes." - Obi-Wan Kenobi , Star Wars: Episode III My biggest problem with the state of sports analysis today is that we seem to be moving away from the middle of the spectrum. Nothing exemplifies this more in my mind than Around the Horn , the ESPN talk show which basically features prominent journalists arguing with each other about sports. Moderator Tony Reali hands out points for different arguments, but the scoring seems to be based more on how vigorously you make your case rather than anything you actually say. The amount of people involved and the short time given to each segment also encourages participants to move away from subtlety in favour of absolutes. That doesn't mean it's necessarily bad; there's obviously a market for this kind of thing, and there are often interesting points raised. The problem is that the format encourages sensationalism and bold stands over critical analysis; why else would Jay Mariotti be a recurri...

An interesting combination of circumstances conspired to form the genesis of this post. Yesterday, I was riding back from a field trip to the Globe and Mail 's Toronto office with several Journal colleagues, sitting in a crowded van, listening to 80's music and reading Sports Illustrated 's Fifty Years of Great Writing . The Simple Minds song Don't You (Forget About Me) of Breakfast Club fame came on, and it struck me that in many ways, that's what great sportswriting is really all about: capturing the games, events and legends and firmly entrenching them in the readers' minds. The ability to do that turns a talented backfield from merely Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden , who would have been remembered as merely one of the many talented units in 1920s college football and likely forgotten about soon afterwards, into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , who have remained outlined against a blue-gray October sky for almost 84 years and seem probable to...