The Best American Sports Writing 2011 Read Online Free Page A

Tiger. I also eliminated stories about women—racecar driver Danica Patrick and a whole roster of scantily clad femme fatale football players—who allow the sexploitation of themselves.
    The need to risk self and sanity was the subject of many of this year's best submissions. Craig Vetter's admirably restrained profile of BASE jumper Dean Potter in
Playboy
reveals a man unable to accept the limits of humanity. Potter isn't satisfied with having flown four miles at 120 miles per hour with a parachute strapped to his back. No, he aims to fly without his hand-tailored Italian wingsuit or a parachute and walk away—like my pal Powers—in a pair of jeans.
    Vetter sets the only appropriate tone for such a story—deadpan.
    Bret Anthony Johnston sees art and aspiration—Pablo Picasso and Mike Tyson—in the daredevil skateboarder Danny Way, broken in so many places and in so many ways, "pushing not merely the limits of skateboarding but the boundaries of the human spirit, the soul."
    The cultivation of confected risk in extremely extreme sports—and the astonishing number of stories devoted to those pursuits—may say something about how far we've come as a species, with leisure time to kill, disposable income to spend, and complacency to defy. It says as much about how far we have to go.
    As I whittled and fiddled, and read and reread, the earth opened up and swallowed Japan. Neptune reared his gnarly head and let loose an epic wave that was definitely not surfable. Those running for their lives did not have to pay an entry fee for this "Death Race."
    I wondered how those images registered, if they registered, with the corporately funded, apparel-endorsing, move-busting, family-busting, serotonin-depleted thrill-seekers who push the extremes of extreme. Do these explorers of human possibility know there was a guy named Magellan who navigated uncharted waters without GPS?
    I wanted to tell Danny Way to read Mark Kram's series for the
Philadelphia Daily News
about a young boxer killed in the ring who became an organ donor and saved five lives. I wanted to tell Austrian aqua man Herbert Nitsch to read Chris Ballard's ode to a dying coxswain, Jill Costello, who steered her last race less than a month before her death from lung cancer. I wanted to tell Dean Potter to read Wright Thompson's homage to the soccer-playing Chilean miners whose old teammates joined the dusty vigil aboveground because, as one said, "we are not friends just of games. We are friends of the heart."
    In its own decidedly nonlethal way, writing is also a kind of risk: these guys take their lives in their hands, and we take their lives in ours when we choose what to reveal about them—and sometimes about ourselves. Nancy Hass's elegy to Mike Penner, a longtime writer for the
Los Angeles Times,
should be required reading for all the leapers, sliders, skaters, and divers who leap, slide, skate, and dive in the name of human fulfillment. Penner risked everything to become the woman he knew himself to be, revealing to his readers that the Old Mike was now the New Christine. In her debut at a press conference introducing David Beckham to L.A., Christine wore "a golden-hued top from Ross and a multi-colored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed heels from Aerosoles." In the end, she was unable to live in her new skin. The life and death of Mike Penner/Christine Daniels bears witness to just how far human beings will go to become fully themselves and the limits that fate places on the enterprise.
    Mike/Christine's last byline was a suicide note. Hass writes: "For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports: Christine Daniels, the woman he became for 18 months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions."
    That was a risk worth dying for.
    J ANE L EAVY

Risks, Danger Always in Play
John