Your favorite SI story ever

I wish I didn't know that.

 

Dan Jenkins on a football game of some note played in Norman, Oklahoma on Thanksgiving Day 1971:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1085606/index.htm

 

You know what's funny, I was looking for this story for this thread, but couldn't remember that Delillo wrote it. I have this issue, actually. Great, great story. I sent it to all my gambler friends once and they thought CJ a hero.

 

Gary Smith on Stanford guard Jamila Wideman

 

I thought the most interesting part of the Garvey story was Steve's reaction. I remember he tried to get an injunction to prohibit distribution of the story, which portrayed him as a complete jerk. He was quoted as saying one of his problems with the story was that the pictures were bad and made him unattractive. No feature story ever revealed more about a person than that quote.

 

That's one I'll never forget as well.

 

Sirs,

Never forget? You've forgotten that it was mentioned on the first page of this thread.

YHS, etc

 

Gary Smith on Pat Summitt:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1012132/index.htm

 

Not unexpectedly, MZGrad would give birth to this thread (I really respect your thinking, man, at least as revealed on this site). Wonderful topic.

Looking back, so many of these stories revealed, as starkly as any other things can be revealed, that MY best doesn't and will NEVER measure up to THEIR best. A sentence from Kenny Moore's "Men of Oregon" (sure, not in SI, but he's an SI guy) or a phrase from Wolff's retrospective on some college cage game reveals that I am and will always be a plumber in a world of artists. Like a quote I read from an Olympic sprinter after the final of some race: You will never know so unequivocally that your best isn't good enough.

Enough pity for my shortcomings, though.

My nominations: Maybe 35 years ago, there was a first-person account of a guy whose playground basketball team held the court the entire day. THEY DID NOT LOSE. If there is a better definition of a perfect day for a wannabe athlete, I've yet to encounter it.

Same time frame, there was a fictionalized account of an athletes' reunion in heaven, notable for the types never leaving the bar (Ruth, Grover Cleveland Alexander, et al.). I want to say Deford wrote this, but have never been able to find it online.

Nack on Secretariat is priceless. Someone's s account of the Red River Rivalry, written through the frame of "Well, wife, you won't have to work on a farm no more" ... because he'd bet the farm on the losing team ... also strikes a chord.

 

I have two. One was when Rick Telander tried out with the Chicago Blitz of the USFL.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1120571/index.htm

The other, very short and leading Scorecard, was Steve Rushin's review of a tax accountant's book. I use that as an example on the power of a few graphs.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1013260/index.htm

 

One of the compilation books (I think it was the 50th anniversary one) had a story on great public relations gimmicks. I can't remember the writer and I have to dig the book out to look it up, but it was a fantastic story.