Play Magazine

I'm a big fan of the New York Times' "Play" magazine, a sportsmagazine that is published every couple months and is entirely free online. It offers the kind of writing that's hard to find in Sports Illustrated these days and is literally impossible to find in ESPN the Magazine. On the plus side, ESPN the Magazine puts the odds that A-Rod will move to Louisiana and make voodoo dolls of Derek Jeter at 7:2, so I guess that's quality journalism.

Chuck Klosterman (one of espn.com's few remaining quality writers) did a fantastic piece on Gilbert Arenas. My favorite excerpt follows:

"Arenas performs a specific routine whenever he shoots free throws: after getting the ball from the ref, he whips it around his back three times, dribbles twice and then releases it skyward. This is his free-throw ritual; all players have one. But what’s interesting is one of the reasons Arenas once gave for its creation: “Kids always want to see something and then copy it. Kids started to copy [the free-throw style of] Richard Hamilton when he made it to the playoffs for the first time. So I said, I might as well make my own up.”

What Arenas is essentially admitting is that he constructed an elaborate ritual in order to look cool. It has nothing to do with winning or losing (or even free-throw shooting); he just thought it would be cool to have little kids mimic him on the playground. It’s an honest explanation of his motives: he deliberately created a way to be idolized by strangers. Yet this is the kind of motivation athletes never admit to. Arenas’s professional vanity is so straightforward it inevitably comes across as charming and childlike. Everyone in the NBA dreams of playing in the All-Star Game, but very few openly lobby for the opportunity; in the 2003-4 season, Arenas traded two pairs of shoes and a jersey for a box of All-Star ballots and voted for himself 50,000 times. He openly admits doing this (he claims it took him a month to cast all the votes). In theory, such behavior should define him as a narcissistic jerk. It does not. It merely makes it seem that, of the 430 guys in the NBA, he’s the only one who isn’t lying."

Michael Lewis (of Moneyball, The Blind Side and Liar's Poker) has a great piece on the life of an NFL kicker. In one part, he spends a few days with Colts' kicker Adam Vinatieri.

"A kicker in the NFL can be one of two things: the bland technocrat who does what he's assigned to do but who, even when he's exceptionally good, must accept that the coach and the team will be credited for the victory. Or he can be the little choke artist who is very nearly entirely responsible for the loss. For a kicker in the NFL, as the NFC executive put it, there is no upside.

Which brings me to the reason I sought out Adam Vinatieri: he is the exception. Obviously many kickers managed to get to the end of their careers as something other than a goat. But no one else has used the position to become a hero. Vinatieri discovered the upside. He's the highest-paid kicker in the game, making $2.4 million a year, but he's much more than that. He has kicked his way through some kind of glass ceiling; he has shattered the emotional barrier between football hero and kicker. He's like the first woman in outer space, or the first black man on Wall Street."

I only wish "Play" came out more often - in today's nonstop SportsCenter "Fact or Fiction" "Buy or Sell" ten-second opinion extravaganza of sports "news", "Play" feels very much like last real attempt at serious sportswriting.

I concede it can be heavy-handed at times ("Okoyoke Mboyokekokayari is just like you and me. Except he can run the mile in 3:45. In snow. And unlike you and me, he was born without legs. Or arms. Or eyes. And he has no teeth. He breathes through his one nostril, the other permananently damaged in a sardine factory accident. And he has no TV. Or CB radio. Running the mile is his only refuge from the real world, which cruelly insists that he must have hands and a face to be hired into any "real" job. Yet onward he runs..."). But generally, the good outweighs the bad, and in most issues, I've found a piece that's nothing less than extraordinary.