Superlative sportswriting begins with superlative writing. So much writing on sports is so poor that it is commonly thought that sportswriting is not for serious writers. And because the games themselves are less consequential, it is the storytelling that is more important than the story. Long after they stopped imagining themselves as future Stanley Cup winners, they had awakened the infinite world of their imagination. Reading Frank Deford’s long pieces — it really didn’t matter the subject — in Sports Illustrated as a teenager was for me an important introduction to the power of the word.

Source: National Post June 01, 2017 15:22 UTC