The Best American Sports Writing 1999

A couple of years ago, Richard Ford himself was included in this annual anthology with a personal--and funny--meditation on hunting with his wife. It's no surprise, then, that Ford, one of America's finest novelists (The Sportswriter), would turn to David Mamet, one of America's finest screenwriters and playwrights (Glengarry Glen Ross) to anchor his superlative collection of the year's best with a very personal and very funny meditation on a deer-hunting trip in Vermont to mark his 50th birthday. "As a hunter, of course, I am a fraud," Mamet admits without much prodding; as an observer of the macho milieu, however, he hits the bull's-eye: "To hunt deer in thick woods in a snowstorm is one of the most beautiful, happiest, things that I know. I was enjoying it so much," he confesses, "that I missed the deer," which were passing in front of him a mere 20 yards away.

If Mamet missed his deer, Ford misses nothing, bagging trophy pieces on Ali (by David Remnick), Michael Jordan's finale (by David Halberstam), a Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo (by John McPhee), the end of Cal Ripkin's streak (by Thomas Boswell), bowling (by Steve Friedman), pool (by J.D. Dolan), and women's pick-up hoops (by Melissa King). Tradition--and seven decades of good craftsmanship--brings Shirley Povich's final Washington Post column into Ford's sights as well.

"There's just something in the American sensibility that values joining the often primal yet contrived acts of sport to the intensities and suave logics of well-made prose," writes Ford in his kick-off to the volume. "It seems to free us.... Plus reading sports may be the only reading for pleasure most Americans ever do." The Best American Sportswriting 1999 certainly adds to that. --Jeff Silverman