Elite athletes, elite storytellers
“The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024” goes far beyond the games to showcase stellar journalism
This story is part of a semi-regular feature, The Crossover Conversation. Chats might be with newsmakers, well-known sports figures past or present or those who might have intriguing insights into what’s going on in sports. Have a suggestion for a Crossover Conversation? Email crossover.iowa@gmail.com
Every year when the annual collection of the year’s best sports writing is announced, I’m always eager to get my hands on it. It’s nice to have stories collected in a book, it’s nice to pick up the book and read it a bit at a time, it’s nice to sit down with a long story and not be interrupted by the flash of an unwanted video on my phone or laptop.
Old lady yelling at a cloud aside, I knew when it was announced that I was really going to like “The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024.” For starters, Caitlin Clark is on the cover and that meant an Iowa story. Then, a glance at the rest of the book showed the best representation of women subjects and sports I’d noticed in the book before. No matter the subjects year in and year out, the anthology of the top stories from the previous year is always a good read. But the presence of more women’s sports in the book shows how women’s sports have become less of a niche and more a part of the culture.
I recently spoke with Jane McManus, who was this year’s editor. She’s a longtime journalist whose work has appeared in Deadspin, ESPN, The New York Times, USA Today and other publications. She also teaches at NYU. Her book, “The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports” comes out in February.
We spoke about the “Best Sports Writing” book, the media landscape around women’s sports and a new award that McManus helped launch. For the first time, the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) honored the best writing about women’s sports with the Billie Jean King Award. It went to a beautiful story by Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post about the enduring friendship of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. It was the most-read sports story in The Post in 2023.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
In your foreword, you address how there is a lot of representation of women and women’s sports in the book, which I’d noticed right away.
I didn’t go into this year with the mindset that I was going to make a point of only picking stories about women or female athletes. But those are the things I’m drawn to. I really like relationship stories, whether they’re mother-son, father-daughter, and there are a couple stories here that are very much relationship focused as opposed to sports focused.
And if you go back and look at all the volumes in this, you’d see there are a lot of stories in that vein.
If you go to sleep and the next morning you are still thinking about a story you read, that’s the kind of story I want. Like the one about Virginia Kraft (“The Big Catch” from the website Long Lead) and her early days as a pioneering sportswriter for Sports Illustrated covering the big game beat, posing with rhinoceroses and elephants she’d killed. It gets into how we feel about that now, and that was compelling. It still sticks with me, that one.
The Ben Golliver story about Caitlin Clark from The Washington Post is interesting to me because it was just before all hell broke loose. (It was published on March 14, 2023.)
In some ways it’s just a story of a girl living in Iowa. It’s got no bells and whistles. It doesn’t hit on any hot button topics. I really felt strongly that if there was a story that was worthy, I really wanted to have a Caitlin Clark story in there, or an NCAA women’s basketball piece.
I had Caitlin Clark stories to choose from but not as many as there would have been in a normal news environment. What I was looking for in this volume were big-picture takeout stories and there just aren’t a lot of those being done anymore.
Do you see this as a boom time for female athletes, or even stories about female athletes?
As much as there can be a boom in a shrinking industry, I’d say yes. But I do think the Washington Post, The Athletic, L.A. Times, Minneapolis, those papers are still committed to telling good stories about women. And in Nebraska, too, with that great volleyball team. Nebraska Public Media has been following that volleyball team around and that’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t have seen 20 years ago.
But I think there’s a lot of investment in women’s sports now. You see the tension that comes with more coverage of the WNBA. I do think you’re going to see more storytelling around women and women’s sports.
A lot of the women I teach say they want to get into sports writing because they want to cover women’s sports. That’s great. And there are a lot of men in my classes, they don’t see a difference between covering women’s sports and covering men’s sports. They see sports. I like that. That’s great.
I really liked the book’s Olivia Dunne story (about an LSU gymnast) because it seemed to be a microcosm of everything. Not just the female college athlete experience but the college experience in general with NIL, crazy fandom and trying to juggle all of that AND deal with a stalker.
That’s Steve Politi (of NJ.com), he’s so good. What I loved about it was sometimes with Livvy Dunne there are so many forces acting on her in the NIL (name, image, likeness) space. It’s obvious that part of the reason she’s successful in the NIL space is she’s conventionally beautiful and desirable to advertisers in the way women have always been desirable to advertisers. I think that’s always really hard for writers to talk about in a frank way without blaming her or pitting her against other women, or they glide over it because it’s a challenging thing to get right.
Steve did a great job, he was so matter of fact about it, saying yeah, that’s part of what is happening here and we can talk about it. But it also brings some negative things and we’re going to talk about that, too, and it’s not a picnic. And this story was a really good treatment of that whole topic.
That’s part of what I look for in these stories: Do you talk about the hard things? I’m not into hagiography. I’m not into, “Oh, this football player is so great” or “This baseball player is so awesome.” That’s less interesting to me than a complicated person with a complicated issue and we’re going to talk about the complicated thing. If there’s a theme to this volume, that might be it.
You start the book with the Chris and Martina story, which I loved when I first saw it in The Post. What makes that story so good?
Sally knows them both and has known them both for a generation, since they were young players. To me, that story is not just about Martina and Chris and how people are pitted against each other and find camaraderie in that. It’s also because Sally has the relationship. They can both be clear with her in a way you couldn’t with someone who just dropped in or wasn’t there at the beginning, or someone who didn’t have the resources of The Washington Post behind them to just drop everything and tell that story like they did.
To me, that’s not just an example of great storytelling, but it’s an example of sports media functioning at its peak. And of a writer at the peak of her powers. It’s the combination of writer, subjects and the institution behind it making sure that story gets full support in its telling.
I wanted to ask about the Billie Jean King Award, too. That is super cool.
Sally won that for that amazing story. Billie went to (USA Today columnist) Nancy Armour and said, “What can we do for women who are writers?” And Nancy came to me and said we’d never had an award for writing about women’s sports, and that’s not necessarily going to be (just for) women in the business because everybody should be writing about women’s sports.
When I was at ESPN and they’d put up stories for APSE (awards) it would be Wright Thompson writing about college football or a Major League Baseball story or something like that. It’s the same at other places too.
Yes, any story can win a beat writing category but in reality it’s going to be your football writer or the big college men’s team in your area. It’s not going to be the girls’ high school writer, even if that coverage was the best coverage.
So I said, “Why don’t we put together an award for coverage of women’s sports?” We took that idea to Billie, had a couple Zooms about it and we got it done. APSE is really on board with it and having Billie involved is not a bad thing.
“The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024” was published by Triumph Books and retails for $19.95. Click here for a list of the stories included in the book.
Jane Burns is a former sports and features writer for the Des Moines Register, as well as other publications and websites. She’s a past winner of the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s Mel Greenberg Award for her coverage of women’s basketball. Over the course of her career she’s covered pretty much everything, which is why her as-yet-to-be-written memoir will be called “Cheese and Basketball: Stories From a Reporter Who Has Covered Everything.”
I’m happy to join fellow Iowa writers and journalists as part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. The collaborative is 60 writers throughout the state - likely some familiar names to Iowa readers - publishing on topics ranging from politics to food to sports and so much more. A subscription (paid or free) gets you a Sunday roundup of all the writers’ work that week. One of my colleagues described it as “Iowa’s Sunday newspaper.”
Meet the writers here, and see for yourself the great variety the collaborative offers.