In the 1920s, The New Yorker published a piece that declared sports a “trivial enterprise” involving “second-rate people and their second-rate dreams and emotions.” The magazine went on to concede, however, that “the quality of writing in the sports pages is, in the large, much superior—wittier, more emotional, more dramatic, and more accurate—to the quality of writing that flows through the news columns.” Indeed, many of the greatest writers in journalism—Grantland Rice, W. C. Heinz, Jim Murray, Red Smith, to name but a few—found their home on the sports pages. Sports are big business and they have big themes: physical and intellectual tests, joy and heartbreak, hope and perseverance, teamwork and individual transcendence. The games and characters are ripe for vivid storytelling, and philosophic discourse about human nature and our culture. They are also part of a multibillion-dollar industry in need of dogged watchdog journalism.

But since the mid-1990s, two forces have diminished classic sports writing. First, television coverage in general has expanded, making hype and the sensational aspects of sports dominant. ESPN became a cultural and media juggernaut, sending fans to SportsCenter for highlights and scores, rendering game recaps and box scores in the next day’s newspapers obsolete. Newspapers gradually began reducing the size of game stories, dashing the more literary ambitions of their writers. Many of the more stylish writers migrated toward higher-profile and better-paying radio and television gigs, and the faster news cycle created a sports world in which the best reporting started getting sliced into smaller stories. It used to be that a star writer like Red Smith would cover the games and put all of his reporting into a substantial game story or one of his columns. “Red Smith was my inspiration to get into sports writing,” says Buster Olney, a senior writer at ESPN...

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