Urban Desires Book Review
Houghton Mifflin
edited by Boswell with Stout
review by Brian Dykstra
review by Brian Dykstra
After reading The Last Shot by Darcey Frey (for those of you who clicked on to this review first, it's the other one.) I was eagerly anticipating digging into more interesting reading from the giants of the business. The forward purports that you don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy good sportswriting because it's just good writing. I'm not even going to go there. If you ain't a fan, this really ain't your book. If you are...
The always entertaining Frank Deford weighs in with The Running Man, a terrific modern history of Nike and the whole sneaker industry. George Plimpton wades into the collection with Fishing on the FDR, an entertaining, if thin piece on the fishers who rod and reel it off the rock-of-Manhattan, into the East River. There's a Bud Collins with something truly forgettable, and Ira Berkow with two pieces in the collection. One on the retirement of Cardinal QB Timm Rosenbach, who wasn't willing to go through the dehumanization process he saw as a necessity in order to survive the game, and the other on the most recent tragedy to befall the great Ferguson Jenkins. They both gave pause, one was sad, they both...well, were stuck in the middle of a book of twenty-three other short pieces of (mostly) biography. Here's a Buster Douglass, there's a Julie Krone.
It strikes me that in their original context as feature articles, each piece shone. They set themselves apart from the deadline driven latest hot streak by this hot team, or that buzzer beating upset, or the latest, Are the Kings for Real? hockey in So Cal, story. A longer, more carefully constructed piece, taking up most of the last quarter of Sports Illustrated, clueing me into the side of Rocky Marciano that was fascinated with cash, might be able to keep my mind off more urgent matters when circling O'Hare in inclement weather, trying to get a runway. Here, they kind of mash together into a sort of sameness. I found myself wanting to get through even well-written pieces in order to uncover the next gem.
Out of the twenty-five, I found that four that really stood out: 1.) The aforementioned Deford piece on shoes. 2.) A funny and revealing look at minor league golf called, They Might Be Giants. 3.) The tragedy waiting to happen that is Lenny Dykstra, and one particular night of foreshadowing in an Atlantic City casino, called Lips Gets Smacked. And finally, Triumph on Sacred Ground, the story of how a nation mourns the death of it's heroes, and of it's sports identity, when the Zambian National Soccer Team is lost in a plane crash. This story brought tears to my eyes in it'sfifteen pages of tortured hope.
Again, let me be clear that, on the whole, the pieces are well written. There simply exists a sameness to them, an echo that reverbs in my mind, nagging me that I've read this all before: A great two-way football player, An overbearing hockey announcer, The loss of a boxing gym, The woman's basketball player who enters a cloister, Mohammed Ali, Aurther Ashe, Magic Johnson, Surfing Alaska, and The U.S. Open. The cloister story and the Alaska surf jumps out of this list, but even they fade to a shared feel, like their values were agreed upon.
Maybe that's the problem with editing a collection like this. The editors pick what they like, and part of what they like is the style. Maybe sportswriters accept certain perameters, or values, or formulas, and the sameness is the glue that lets somebody judge what is "Best of..." in the first place. I found myself wading through this sameness, only to quite unexpectedly come across a highlight like, "Watching Lenny Dykstra gamble is like having an orchestra seat at a one character David Mamet tragicomic-psychodrama. You are appalled and delighted by the language and the largesse, the exposed and tortured soul. You enjoy the ride. You know it will end badly." Writing like this delights and surprises me. In this collection, however, it's too rare an occurrencer.
I realize that each reader will stumble across favorite passages and sections that are very different from mine. But in the end, I don't think it was worth the trouble.
