Modest Brits and swan Yanks
Marcus Berkmann
THE PICADOR BOOK OF SPORTS WRITING edited by Nick Coleman and Nick Hornby Picador, £16.99, pp. 405
Johnnie Walker this is Jack Daniels.'
thirst for sport forces us to read news- papers backwards have long appreciated the quality of reporting in the Daily Tele- graph and the Guardian. Only now, though, has everyone else caught on. This is the moment to publish an anthology of spOrtswriting — not least because if you didn't do it soon, someone else would do it first.
The Picador Book of Sportswriting, as well as being first, enjoys another important advantage: the participation of Nick Horn- by himself. Although reduced to second place in the billing by an accident of alpha- betical order, Hornby's name is as close to a guarantee of excellence (and, according- ly, sales) as you can get in the sportswriting field. He is a serious sports fan and a seri- ous man, and he knows his stuff. His col- laborator Nick Coleman, who writes for the Independent, is no less well informed. They will have approached this task with enthusi- asm and considerable care.
They have unearthed some real gems. Martin Amis on tennis, Roddy Doyle on Charlie Cooke, Arthur Hoperaft on the referee, V. S. Naipaul at Lord's — all are top-notch. There's an intriguing memoir of teenage cheerleading from Donna Tartt and a couple of typically pithy pieces from Hugh Mcllvanney on George Best and Muhammad Ali. From the American Paul Solotaroff comes a long and breathtakingly unpleasant piece on the chemistry of body- building which sticks in the mind longer than it should. Even Molesworth is repre- sented, brilliantly summing up cricket in a single page and thus rendering irrelevant the combined efforts of thousands of writ- ers on the subject. The range of the collec- tion is large and satisfyingly ambitious.
Such a broad scope can create its own problems, of course. Coleman and Hornby have tried hard to please everyone: the general reader, the ardent fan, the British and, most debatably of all, the American. 'If there is a lot of American sportswriting in this book,' they say in their introduction, 'it is because American sportswriters have set the pace.' Maybe, but you probably need to be an American to appreciate them fully. To English eyes, most of the Ameri- can writers here are simply far too pleased with themselves. They don't tell you very much; they are too busy delighting in the telling. After reading Roger Angell 00 baseball, or Frederick Exley on US foot- ball, or George Plimpton on anything, you come to value the rigour and self-efface- ment of the British writers. The process culminates with Norman Mailer's narcolep- tic account of the Ali-Foreman fight in 1975, which wastes 24 pages. Still, you can always skip the ones you don't like. The pleasures in Coleman and Hornby's collection generally outweigh the disappointments. It won't be the most con- sistent sportswriting anthology ever pub- lished, but it has set an admirably high standard. Anyone prone to reading news- papers backwards will lap it up.
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