I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several […]
Tags:basketball·Gary McLain·journalism·magazines·sports·Sports Illustrated·writing
Over the years here at Microkhan, we’ve spilled a lot of digital ink while paying homage to the Sports Illustrated stories that sparked our love for writing. Another one recently bubbled back up to the surface, mostly because it has one haunting line about the link between the physical and the psychological. The piece is […]
Tags:hair·horse racing·literature·psychology·Raymond Carver·sports·Sports Illustrated·William Nack·writing
It’s fair to say this has been a momentous week for Willie Gault, the former Chicago Bears wideout who was also a track star of great renown. Things started off great when police in Los Angeles found his stolen Super Bowl ring, but then took a turn for the worse—the much, much worse—after news emerged […]
Tags:crime·football·Julius Caesar·Scientology·Sports Illustrated·Willie Gault·writing
The deeper I get into my latest book project—just crossed the 30,000-word mark—the more I keep digging into memories of my formative reading experiences. Doing so goes a long way toward helping me understand why I’m attracted to certain stories, and that self-awareness helps me separate the narrative wheat from the narrative chaff. Loyal followers […]
Tags:defectors·East Germany·Jens-Peter Brendt·sports·Sports Illustrated·swimming·writing
I love this whole approach of picking apart successful yarns to figure out what makes them work. To get myself in the book-writing mindset, I’ve been doing likewise with a bunch of great stories from my formative years—things that have managed to stick with me all these decades later. It’s probably no great shock for […]
Tags:Ernest Hemingway·fame·football·Percy Howard·sports·Sports Illustrated·Super Bowl
Knocking back a few pints with fellow scribe Doug Merlino last night, the conversation inevitably turned to sports—or, more specifically, the late 1980s heyday of Sports Illustrated, the magazine that taught us both to love the art of storytelling. We both remembered that this vintage era of SI featured a ginormous number of “as told […]
Tags:drugs·football·sports·Sports Illustrated·steroids·Tommy Chaikin·writing
Writing about the hammer throw has got me thinking a lot about Soviet Bloc athletics, and in turn one of the phenomena that fascinated me during my youth: East-to-West defectors. I was always drawn to tales of sportsmen from the other side of the Iron Curtain who decided to chuck it all and start anew […]
Tags:Cold War·discus·East Germany·Soviet Union·sports·Sports Illustrated·Wolfgang Schmidt
I’m just now getting cranking on a sports-related project—my first crack at writing about the athletic games that adults play since I covered the Nagano Olympics as a mere cub. To get into the right mindset for the challenge, I’ve been looking up the old Sports Illustrated stories that influenced me so deeply as young’un. […]
