Hunter S. Thompson on sportswriting: "It keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all."

I'm not sure how it came up, but yesterday I became engaged in a discussion about sportswriting. It brought to mind a piece by Hunter S. Thompson, but I couldn't place it, and then miraculously, a Twitter discussion about Thompson's best sportswriting led right to it.

It's just funny.

Epitaph ... "Nixon Uber Alles" ... Four More Years ... Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl

 ... Sportswriters are a kind of rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks whose only real function is to publicize & sell whatever the sports editor sends them out to cover....

Which is a nice way to make a living, because it keeps a man busy and requires no thought at all. The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.

Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."

Right. And there was the genius of Grantland Rice. He carried a pocket thesaurus, so that "The thundering hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen" never echoed more than once in the same paragraph, and the "Granite-grey sky" in his lead was a "cold dark dusk" in the last lonely line of his heart-rending, nerve-ripping stories...

James returns home, and Zirin called the shot.

(Update: Zirin follows up)

As I constantly remind you, Dave Zirin is one of the few sportswriters in America worth reading on a daily basis. Zirin places sports into a context, as a part of life, not removed from it. I only wish he had time to bring the same skill set to beer writing, which is in a wretched condition these days.

Zirin predicted LeBron James's return to Cleveland. Not last week ... but on March 25, 2013.

The Aspiring Folk Hero: Why LeBron James Will Return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

I believe that in 2014, NBA megastar LeBron James will create the feel-good sports story of the millennium by becoming a free agent and rejoining the Cleveland Cavaliers. This seems like an impossible scenario: the team that LeBron spurned to “take [his] talents to South Beach”; the fan base that burned his jersey when he made “the Decision”; the owner who sent unhinged messages to the press in both the font and tone of an over-stimulated 11-year-old. It sounds impossible, yet LeBron hasn’t denied the possibility, and it makes sense in a way that transcends dollars, cents and championships.

ESPN's ombudsman follows up on the Dr. V story.

The source material is here: Heavy reading: A golf club, an outing, a suicide and Frank Sinatra. Robert Lipsyte's job is that of ombudsman:

ESPN appointed Robert Lipsyte for an 18-month term as ombudsman to offer independent examination and analysis of ESPN's television, radio, print and digital offerings.

For thoughts on ombudsman position in contemporary journalism, go here:

But in practice, the ombudsman jobs at such institutions as the Post and the New York Times have served primarily as safety shields for newspapers, with the ombudsmen catching, deflecting or containing the flak tossed by readers.

Finally, Lipsyte examine the Dr. V piece at Grantland:

Dr. V story understandable, inexcusable, by Robert Lipsyte (ESPN Ombudsman)

A young golfer’s obsession with an oddly shaped putter invented by a mysterious scientist and endorsed on YouTube? I will give that kind of story no more than a few paragraphs to grab my interest before I bail out, even if it is featured on a site known for compelling storytelling.

Just a few moments into reading that very story recently on Grantland, it was shaping up as another one of those bloated selfies that clog the arteries of sports-lit these days.

Four graphs and I was gone.

Thus, even though “Dr. V’s Magical Putter” was hastily hailed in the Twitterverse as another long-form masterpiece, I didn’t get back to it until after what would turn out to be a powerful backlash -- an angry and anguished firestorm captured in this e-mail to the ombudsman from Brenna Winsett of Minneapolis:

“If ESPN writers can hound a transgender person to death over something like a golf club, is there any line they won't cross?” she wrote. “This garbage makes a mockery of this woman's life and encourages readers to view transgender people's identities as frauds.”

Now, the story had my attention.

Heavy reading: A golf club, an outing, a suicide and Frank Sinatra.

For the hundredth time, thanks to Dave Zirin of The Nation for sportswriting that actually matters, on a daily basis. Zirin places sports into context, as a part of life, not removed from it. I only wish he had time to bring the same skills into beer writing, which is in a wretched state these days.

On Saturday, Zirin was tweeting about this saga. It begins here:

Dr. V’s Magical Putter; The remarkable story behind a mysterious inventor who built a "scientifically superior" golf club, by Caleb Hannan (Grantland)

... I play golf. Sometimes poorly, sometimes less so. Like all golfers, I spend far too much time thinking of ways to play less poorly more often. That was the silver lining to my sleeplessness — it gave me more time to scour YouTube for tips on how to play better. And it was then, during one of those restless nights, that I first encountered Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, known to friends as Dr. V.

As soon becomes evident, this is not a story about a golf club. It is about a suicide, and a writer getting the story, whatever the outcome (in this case, chilling), because "The Story Is The Most Important Thing" -- as lucidly critiqued here by a fellow writer.

SINATRA’S COLD IS CONTAGIOUS: Hostile Subjects, Vulnerable Sources & The Ethics of Outing, by Maria Dahvana Headley (GLITTERING SCRIVENER blog)

THERE ARE THINGS ABOUT BEING A WRITER THAT SUCK. One of them is that as a writer, you’re sometimes sold a bill of bullshit.

Here is a prime example: The Story Is The Most Important Thing.

This line is a lie, but in order to make students pay for writing instruction – and sometimes in order to fuel our own egos as writers who often professionally neglect the people in our lives so that we can sit in silence making things up – we have to have a culture in which story matters more than anything else.

The Dr. V story is sobering enough, and Headley's deadly accurate corrective edifying, but what of colds? Specifically, what the hell is meant by "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"? Read all about it here:

FRANK SINATRA HAS A COLD, by Gay Talese (April, 1966 in Esquire; 2007 reboot)

In the winter of 1965, writer Gay Talese arrived in Los Angeles with an assignment from Esquire to profile Frank Sinatra. The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra -- his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on -- and observing the man himself wherever he could. The result, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," ran in April 1966 and became one of the most celebrated magazine stories ever published, a pioneering example of what came to be called New Journalism -- a work of rigorously faithful fact enlivened with the kind of vivid storytelling that had previously been reserved for fiction. The piece conjures a deeply rich portrait of one of the era's most guarded figures and tells a larger story about entertainment, celebrity, and America itself. We're very pleased to republish it here.

"Chasing Jose" -- by the great Pat Jordan.

If you're a sports fan and are still unfamiliar with the work of Pat Jordan, you're missing out.

Jordan is a gifted writer who only happens to write about games, and by doing so, he invests the normally mundane topic with a depth and universal applicability seldom seen in the genre, as in a recent piece (linked below) on baseball star, steroid abuser and supposed screenplay writer Jose Canseco's inability to return a telephone call.

It is wickedly funny, but at the same time, Canseco's nihilistic self-absorption is revealed as far more sad than anything else. Jordan's question is left unstated: Why do we idolize such flawed men?

Chasing Jose

I tried to picture Jose writing his book and his movie. Hunched over, his broad shoulders casting a shadow across his desk like a raptor's wings, his brow furrowed in concentration, his massively muscled body tensed in anticipation of that torrent of words about to flow out of him like urine for one of the many steroid tests he'd been forced to take during his baseball career. I wondered, just how does Jose write? Like Shakespeare, with a quill pen on parchment? Like Dickens, wearing a green eye shade while seated at a clerk's desk? Like Hemingway, standing at a lectern in Finca Vigia, with a stubby pencil and unlined paper? Like Thomas Wolfe, in his Victorian house in Ashville, pounding away on a tall, black, manual Underwood? Or maybe the words flow out of Jose in such a torrent, 10,000 an hour, that he can relieve himself adequately of his thoughts only by tap-tap-tapping on a lightning fast computer, like Stephen King?