Who's Your Best? (Cont.)

At the request of the site’s benevolent curator, I pondered competitive connections with primo athletes and relationships with illustrious former peers, and found both lacking. Or more accurately, my recall and engagement are lacking. But in the interest of thematic continuity, here’s a meager addition to “Who’s Your Best?” 

The area south of Annapolis, Md., where I grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s was transitioning from rural to suburban and produced no athletes of note. Granted, plenty of professional athletes come from tiny, nondescript places – Jerry Rice is from a small town in eastern Mississippi with a population of fewer than 1,000, Bo Jackson is from Bessemer, Ala. (pop. 27,000) and Scottie Pippen came from Hamburg, Ark. (pop. 3,000) – just not my nondescript place. Closest I came was a high school buddy, a multi-sport athlete and all-around good goof in his younger days named Dale Castro, who went on to become an All-American punter and kicker at the University of Maryland. 

In my previous life as a newspaper sports guy in southeastern Virginia, I was fortunate to cover an inordinate number of exceptional athletes and events. I saw Allen Iverson and Michael Vick and Alonzo Mourning and Bryant Stith and Chris Slade and Ronald Curry and Percy Harvin and champion quarter-miler LaShawn Merritt and Ticha Penicheiro and Olympic gold medalist Francena McCorory. That list doesn’t even include those who competed in the area as youngsters – David Robinson at the Naval Academy, Elena Delle Donne at Delaware, Brian Westbrook at Villanova – and a metric f*ckton of future college and pro hoopsters at local AAU impresario Boo Williams’ tournaments such as Jason Kidd and Kenny Anderson and Kevin Durant and Breanna Stewart and Tyson Chandler and Maya Moore and Jayson Tatum and Trae Young. 

Given that my longtime home didn’t have major league sports, I saw many of those athletes in their formative years, before they became famous and wealthy. Though I did witness all-timer Annika Sorenstam win her 72nd and final LPGA Tour event in Williamsburg and saw then-local pro Curtis Strange at the height of his powers at the annual PGA Tour stop there. I spent time around future world champion boxer and Norfolk native Pernell Whitaker and his 1984 Olympic teammates Evander Holyfield, Mark Breland and Meldrick Taylor, who were managed and packaged together for several years and regularly stopped in Hampton Roads. 

Which gets to the “coverage” part. Much of my work put me around other Virginia and mid-Atlantic reporters, many of whom were aces if not well known outside their readership and writer circles. Occasional Washington NFL games and ACC coverage put me in rooms with a bunch of Washington Post staffers. Former columnists Dave Kindred and Ken Denlinger were gracious and amiable. John Feinstein was always friendly to me, but I get that he rubs some folks the wrong way. Before he became TV Personality Mike and Mouthpiece of the Stars, Michael Wilbon was approachable and receptive. Liz Clarke was a kind of jill-of-all-trades who wrote about everything from the NFL to tennis to NASCAR to the Olympics. She was a lovely and friendly and chatty presence and more than willing to quaff a couple beers after deadline in the press parking lot with the rest of us idiots following night races at Richmond International Raceway. 

I covered a Super Bowl, three NCAA Final Fours, a national championship football game and a slew of NCAA Tournament games, men and women. Which is to say that periodically I was around a lot of Bigfoot writers and journalists, most of whom I barely glanced at because I was either busy working or hanging with those I knew. A couple of them, however, left an impression: Before he moved to political writing and blogging, Charlie Pierce was a top-shelf sportswriter, mostly for Boston and New England outlets. He dips back into the genre now and then and remains a go-to when he does so. I shared a few press rooms with him at several NCAA Tournament sites in the ‘80s, ‘90s and early ‘00s. In the days before the internet and when everything was available, I managed to read his stuff on occasion and marveled at his style. In person, from a distance, he was smart, gregarious, and a wicked quick writer. He also often wore a baseball hat with patches of Historically Black Colleges and Universities logos sewn into the crown, a small yet visible statement of his support and solidarity with those under-funded and often underappreciated schools. 

Frank Deford was sports writing royalty. He was one of the preeminent writers and essayists for Sports Illustrated in its heyday, a man whose stuff I read religiously. I shared a few press rooms with him in the ‘80s and ‘90s and tried to keep my gawking to a minimum. Where Pierce often looked like an unmade bed, Deford cut, dare I say, a dashing figure. Tall (6-foot-4), lean, dark hair combed back, rakish mustache, dressed in a sportcoat, button-down collared shirt and slacks, handkerchiefs tucked into lapel pockets, he might have stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel. As a writer, he was a brilliant stylist and someone who preached observation and detail and description and narrative. There’s a story that he once told a fellow staffer who he thought relied on too many quotes in a feature piece: “You’re a writer, not a stenographer.” 

Best I got. I’ll try to connect and engage better in my next life.

The Best Thing Gheorghe Read This Week

Charlie Pierce is arguably the greatest living American writer, journalism division. He's almost certainly the most underrated. In addition to his stellar work at Esquire, where he ceaselessly skewers our increasingly absurd political process, he pops up from time to time at places like Sports Illustrated. This week was one of those times.

Pierce's remembrance of Pearl Washington, who died of a brain tumor on April 20, is among the most well-crafted gems of sportswriting I can remember. In it, we see a writer fully possessed of an understanding of moments, of Pearl's unique style, of the way sports moves us.

This paragraph, the piece's closing argument, is one of the finest evocations of the power of sports to bring joy I've read and lamentation for how we don't celebrate it today as we once did. It's Gheorghian in its essence, even if we could never write it as well Pierce. Read it and applaud:

"We’ve come in our time to demystify joy. We parse it, and sell it, and we manufacture it if we can’t find it any other way. It does not rise unbidden, the way it once did. It does not build, slowly and steadily.  It is presented, whole and rounded, for our consumption. But once there was a time when its origins were a mystery, its sources vague and unclear. And, when it arrived, it lingered. I heard about what Pearl Washington could do long before I saw it myself. He had made me happy in the abstract long before I saw him drop the shot against B.C. or put every Georgetown player into the MixMaster as the Garden steamed around him. I did not have to be sold on him. His legend had sold itself. That was the way it was once, when word-of-mouth was gospel. That was the source of the happiness I always will feel that I had the gift of watching the basketball in the hands of Pearl Washington, dead of brain cancer on Wednesday, at the age of 52."