Beyond the Game
The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Fifteen compelling stories from the acclaimed Sports Illustrated correspondent who’s been hailed as one of America’s finest sportswriters.
Gary Smith’s sportswriting stands among the best journalism being written today. His award-winning stories shatter the confines of traditional sports reportage, getting beneath the wins and losses and penetrating into the hearts of the athletes themselves into their lives and personal struggles, their communities and their worlds.
Beyond the Game brings together fifteen of Smith’s greatest stories, from groundbreaking profiles of international stars like Mike Tyson and Magic Johnson, to intimate looks at lesser-known athletes whose lives are driven by the thrill of competition and the love of a game. There is “Damned Yankee,” the heartbreaking story of John Malangone, who seemed destined to succeed Yogi Berra as the Yankees’ starting catcher until his career was destroyed by the crushing weight of a childhood trauma that continued to haunt him. “Someone to Lean On” is the inspirational story of an extraordinary retarded man named Radio and the South Carolina high school football team that has adopted him for over thirty years. “Shadow of a Nation” tells of a Crow Indian community’s intense passion for basketball and how former high school star Jonathan Takes Enemy must struggle to escape the tragic history of his tribe as he seeks a place in the world outside the reservation.
The stories in Beyond the Game are stories of dreams and fears, failure and triumph, self-destruction and salvation, set in the twilight shadows between the sun-drenched playing fields and brightly lit arenas at the heart of sports and the darkness of the locker rooms and lonely streets that lurk at their periphery. Each of Gary Smith’s moving stories will profoundly touch you and remain with you, long after you have closed the pages of this book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I've always had the feeling that the most compelling and significant story was the one occurring beyond the game before it, after it, above it, or under it, deep in the furnace of the psyche." It is precisely this instinct to go beyond to find the humanity and grace, will power and fear within the story that makes Smith's writing so clear, vivid and passionate. Smith, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, isn't the kind of sportswriter who fires off questions and records the answers there's nothing pro forma about the way he works or how he is able to capture and reveal the small, unexpected details "that make or unmake a life." Neither does he just focus on the big names in professional and college sports, although Muhammad Ali, Mark McGwire, Mike Tyson and Pat Summitt appear in this volume of exceptional journalism. Smith finds the same zeal at the high-school level, as in the tale of Jonathan Takes Enemy, a one-time high-school basketball star nearly destroyed by drink and yet determined to make it as a college player. Some of Smith's stories aren't about winners at all but about those others who are lured in by their love of the game. For example, "Someone to Lean On" describes Radio, the lovable, mentally disabled man who learned to speak while managing numerous sports teams at T.L. Hanna High School in Anderson, S.C. Indeed, these 15 pieces set a new standard for sportswriting. Whether the reader is a die-hard fan or a lover of gifted storytelling, he or she will find Smith's book impossible to put down. FYI: Smith is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and was once selected in a poll of Associated Press editors as the sportswriter they'd most like to hire.
