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"The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan"

Truly good sports writing gets past box scores and statistics, by bringing together the sports world with the real world.  Throughout his career, Pat Jordan's has tried to do just this, taking the games that we watch and the players that we root for and putting them in context.  Bill Littlefield reviews Jordan's new book, The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan, and discusses some of the more memorable tales that Jordan has covered.

Collecting Pat Jordan’s journalism into a book was a terrific idea, because otherwise, unless you saved old issues of Philadelphia Magazine, Inside Sports, Premiere, and Harpers, you’d be out of luck if you wanted to read it or re-read it. Jordan’s strengths as a writer are many and varied. He’s a good listener, which counts for a great deal, and he’s got a fine sense of the absurd. In a 2001 New Yorker  story about O.J. Simpson, Jordan refers to his subject as “a man unburdening himself of the most intimate truths of his heart which, for O.J., are neither intimate nor true.”      Jordan is also a hard worker. Whereas numerous writers were willing to swallow whole the manufactured myth of Gregory “Toe” Nash, a prospect who allegedly “had Mark McGwire power and Doc Gooden’s arm,” Jordan discovered that Nash was a self-destructive thug who’d committed statutory rape and a host of other felonies. He interviewed not only the baseball people who had scouted, coached, and employed Nash, but also the lawyers who’d prosecuted and defended him, and the young woman he’d raped. Pat Jordan’s best work is sharp and durable as well as entertaining. It is “sports writing” because his subjects are involved in games; it is also bright and solid story-telling full of humor, wisdom, and grace.

Headshot of Bill Littlefield

Bill Littlefield Host, Only A Game
Bill Littlefield was the host of Only A Game from 1993 until 2018.

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