|
|
|
|
ESPN
SportsCentury
Edited By Michael MacCambridge
Hyperion, 288 pages, September 1999
ESPN SportsCentury is the coffee-table book companion to the sports network's ongoing SportsCentury project, which is documenting the century's greatest athletes and sports moments.
Like the project's list of the 100 greatest athletes, the book provokes debate, especially with its choice of the defining athlete of each decade. (I would've picked Jesse Owens over Joe Louis as one of the 1930s choices.) But ESPN has made a wise choice in choosing revolutionary athletes, not just the biggest legends. Under this criteria, track and field stars and boxers receive as much recognition as basketball players.
The best thing about ESPN SportsCentury, however, is its literate essays that, at their peak, tie a particular athlete to the events of the decade in which he or she played. Pete Rose may not be your first thought when you think of great athletes of the 1980s, but Thomas Boswell finds a link between the player and his time: Greed. In "The Price You Pay," Boswell writes:
"Perhaps no athlete could have encapsulated the immaturity, energy, charm, excess, conspicuous consumption and corrupted innocence of the decade more than the ballplayer known as Charlie Hustle; for Rose was truly the king of the hustlers -- in the best and worse sense."
While Boswell spends time examining Rose's ride to fame in the 1960s and 1970s, he focuses more on the player's vanities (the Gucci, the diamond-studded Rolex, the swagger) and the subsequent bonfire (the gambling, the tax evasion, the jail time). Even worse, Boswell concludes, the events at the end of the 1980s humbled Rose so little.
"Periodically he talks about reinstatement or the Hall of Fame. ... Hasn't he internalized the fact yet that, a week after he was banned, [baseball commissioner A. Bartlett] Giamatti died of a heart attack?"
We find ourselves shaking our heads at Rose's conduct, much in the same way we do at Wall Street's Gordon Gekko, another of the decade's symbols.
ESPN SportsCentury has assembled an all-star lineup of contributors. Historical writer David Halberstam opens with an essay on the place of sports in the 20th century. As America changed from farming to affluence, sports would be a beneficiary, he claims. Writer and noted boxing fan Joyce Carol Oates looks at Muhammad Ali; Dick Schaap writes about Johnny Unitas; Nelson George, whose previous work includes a look at black men in basketball, marvels about Michael Jordan's head and heart.
Along with each decade's defining athlete, the book includes profiles on all 100 athletes on the SportsCentury list. However, the book doesn't give their rankings, preserving - for now - the argument as to who is No. 1.
The book is divided by decades, with each section including an essay on that decade's defining athlete, profiles of that period's SportsCentury athletes and a playback section that features snippets of the greatest moment in sports and sports entertainment.
The playback section, though, could provide as much argument as the list of athletes. For example, missing from the highlights of the '80s are Doug Flutie's Hail Mary pass against Miami, surprising championships by college basketball's North Carolina State and Villanova, and the 1986 World Series. Obviously, this section could have been expanded.
Also disappointing is the selection of photographs at the beginning of the book. For ESPN, the photographic part of the sports century seems to have ended in 1975.
Nevertheless,
ESPN SportsCentury remains a thoughtful, well-composed book about
the pastimes of these and other times. The book shows that sports writing
isn't all clichés and melodrama; it is also reflective and wide-reaching.
Even a non-
sports enthusiast should at least flip through this work.
Grade: A-
Back
to top
To post
a comment on Lisa's review, go to the Speak
Out page.
To e-mail your opinion to Lisa, click
here.
Today's Lineup | Sports
Pages | Features | Newsstand
| Sports Links
Speak Out | Mailing
List | Scouting Dept. | About
Us | Home
