Editor’s Corner
November 6, 2009
Playing Deep
By
Andrea Pitzer
Sports stories can go surprising places: Champion player Andre Agassi reveals he has hated tennis since childhood. The Washington Post’s Les Carpenter brings together a Chinese boy band, a reality show, and the NFL’s efforts to invade China. Michael Vick not only turns out to be a leader of a dogfighting ring but goes to prison and subsequently returns to professional football. Who’d have guessed?
More often, though, the staples of narrative sportswriting are well-done stories of stellar athletes or master coaches. It’s hard work to make these profiles feel fresh, but they often show how classic storylines can remain engaging after decades of use.
Joe Posnanski delivers up a winning end to his profile of Penn State’s Joe Paterno, now in his 60th season of coaching. Tom Verducci conveys the relentless talent and drive of 16-year-old baseball prodigy Bryce Harper, who is widely expected to become the best professional player of his generation. As both these Sports Illustrated stories show, the promise of youth and the fruits of wisdom on the playing field can still make for good reading.
Yet what jolts a sports story from compelling to riveting is when something unexpected creeps into the classic storyline. In “The Power of One,” about a high school athlete from a tiny town in Texas, Gary Smith shows how the game is played.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment that a story goes from being able to meet the needs of a specific audience (sports, arts, politics) to hitting a deeper nerve. A basic narrative moves from one point on the emotional spectrum (such as conflict or anger) to another (triumph, joy), creating the simplest effective form of story. But the most dexterous writers can vary their tones and subordinate themes, nestling grief up next to triumph or tucking relief in with failure, a complexity that more closely mirrors our interior lives and creates a greater sense of revelation.
In “The Power of One,” Smith gives us the beginning and end of his story in the first five hundred words. Here it is in eighteen: a high school athlete wins Texas’ Class 1A team track competition by herself two years in a row. There remains no mystery about what will unfold, but Smith’s opening is so engrossing that it becomes impossible not to wonder “How could that happen?” The movement from “what happened” to “how” is where narrative shines. Answering that question takes us to the heart of a teenager’s desire for and fear of greatness—the kind of story that makes us want to read on.