Best American Sports Writing 2003

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Introduction If you care, as I do, with a love and passion that is almost mysterious because of the very depths of it, this was the year that pushed me overboard. To hell with sports. To hell with all of it. To hell with the greed and the pettiness. To hell with that insouciant arrogant athlete swagger of I-could- care-less, man-boys making their millions and not putting out a dime's worth of effort for it. The hype got to me, the towering Babel of Kornheiser and Wilbon and Rome and Tom Arnold, Tom Arnold for godsakes. The saturation got to me, college football games around the clock, NCAA basketball for every mood swing, the NFL draft receiving almost as much bad seat-of-the-pants analysis as the War in Iraq. The scandals got to me, the pathetic shame of the Harricks at Georgia and the decision by St. Bonaventure, when confronted with cheating, to simply cancel the rest of the basketball season as if it never happened. I got tired of sports pages reading like rap sheets. I got tired of wondering whether Shaq liked Kobe or Kobe liked Shaq. I got tired of checking the box score every night to see how many times Rasheed Wallace had pouted. The more I read about high school basketball wunderkind LeBron James, the more it seemed like a nasty little morality play, big-time magazines and big-time networks making this kid larger than life only to chisel away at him when he began to act like the entitled smack- ass monster that they of course had created. I went to a couple of Major League Baseball games, but they were at Veterans Stadium in Philly where I live. The stadium is amorphous and atmosphere-less, everything about it drab except for the hideous glaring green of the artificial-surface field and the increasingly desperate prancings of the Phanatic. By the time it got into the fifth inning, the players seemed like they were in slow motion in the thick soupy summer Philly heat, and I knew it wasn't just the beer that was inducing such bleary-eyed lethargy. I went to an NBA game in Seattle. Thanks to a friend, I had a great seat on the floor right opposite the Seattle SuperSonics'bench. The SuperSonics were playing Indiana, and the game was pretty good, actually damn good since it went into overtime. You couldn't help but admire the intensity of Gary Payton even if his scowl did cast the entire arena in shadow. But it was the conduct of the players on the Seattle bench that drew my attention, the way they rose for a team huddle during a time-out with all the enthusiasm of arthritic octogenarians, the cool little nods they gave during the game to friends in the stands, as if what happened after the game was a whole lot more important than what was happening during it. I went to a pro football game in Tennessee. It was a big game, a Monday Night game on ABC, the Titans versus the Patriots. As a result, there was a lot of hype, and it seemed to me that for some of the players, in particular Jevon Kearse, the pregame intro was far more important than the game itself, the way he ran onto the field like a gyrating drum major, swiveling his head back and forth with slightly less effect than when Linda Blair did her 360 in The Exorcist. It was a grand entrance, a great entrance. The fans loved it. The cameras loved it. Kearse loved it most of all, making his invisible play during the game almost incidental. Face time, baby. Face time. And he had gotten lots of face time in that preening cockadoodle strut, better than any sack. The disillusionment I felt wasn't something conjured up. Sports truly has defined my life, a presence as powerful in my forties as it was in my prepubescence. Drawing ever closer to the no-man's-land of fifty, I am shocked by the slippage of so many facts th