BOOKS
A Few Seconds of Panic (The Penguin Press, July 7, 2008) tells two stories. One is the Everyman tale of a forty-something guy absurdly attempting to play professional football. I took my job as rookie kicker seriously, and if I didn’t pose a threat to the Broncos’ veteran incumbent, Jason Elam, I was determined to demonstrate that I was an athlete, too. The book’s second storyline is about how an NFL team functions, from the front office roster machinations to the locker-room anxieties, the stress, fear, paranoia, boredom, and frustration that govern the lives of the players. MORE
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Word Freak (Houghton Mifflin, 2001; Penguin, 2002): When I entered the small, hidden subculture of competitive Scrabble in 1997, I knew a few things. I knew, thanks mostly to a memorable Sports Illustrated feature story by S.L. Price a couple of years earlier, that it existed. I knew that I was susceptible to the hypnotic sway of the game and of language; my childhood pal Andy and I still talked about my brash, shockingly acceptable play of ACADEMES back in high school, and I had played casually ever since. MORE
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Wild and Outside (Walker, 1995, 1996): In the spring of 1993, while reporting a series of articles for The Associated Press about Major League Baseball’s latest labor and financial unrest, I heard about a new minor league in the upper Midwest. Unlike almost all of the other minor-league teams in North America, the six franchises in the Northern League had no affiliation with big-league organizations. The league’s founder was Miles Wolff, whose Durham Bulls helped make bush-league baseball fashionable in the 1980s. He told me the club owners were united in their frustration with the major-league overlords who controlled the minors. MORE
ANTHOLOGIES
Anatomy of Baseball (Southern Methodist University Press, 2008). This collection of baseball writing edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner includes essays from Roger Angell, Kevin, Baker, Sean Wilentz and others. My contribution is “My Glove: A Biography,” in which I trace the life of the Rawlings XPG6 model I bought in the spring of 1977, when I turned 14, and still cherish today. “It’s sure broken in perfect,” Rawlings’ esteemed glove designer, Bob Clevenhagen, said in one of the happiest moments of my life. I showed the XPG6 to Cal Ripken Jr. and Frank Robinson, researched its hallowed pedigree and agreed, reluctantly, to have it restored. A condensed version appeared in The Wall Street Journal, and I read from it and talked about it with Robert Siegel on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The Boston Globe carried a nice review. The essay also was published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008)
The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything (Bloomsbury, 2007).One of the great ideas of our times. Richard Sandomir, the sports-business writer for the New York Times, and Mark Reiter compiled 101 annotated NCAA-style brackets to determine the apotheosis of everything from black-and-white TV shows to Paul Simon songs to bald guys to typefaces to presidential speeches to … Scrabble words. My 32-word bracket includes classics (to Scrabble players) such as OXYPHENBUTAZONE, AUBERGINES, QUIXOTRY and AA, and culminates in a final between QAT and WATERZOOI. QAT, I write, “has long embodied the essence of the game, where U-less Q words, like thousands of other obscurities, are indispensable and often beautiful.”
