My Own "Best Of" List, With a Twist

Now is when we all get sucked into year-end lists. The best movies. The best books. The best albums. The best sportswriting. Of course, being a sportswriter myself, I'm especially interested in this last one, the various lists sending readers to the most interesting sports stories of the year. And as a female sportswriter, I can't help but notice how these lists are dominated by men. Sure, men write a lot of really great stories. In fact, one of my favorite pieces of the year was Man Up, by Brian Phillips of Grantland. It's a pitch-perfect takedown of the NFL's warrior culture, and it includes dozens of money lines like this one: "It's as if we're a nation of gentle accountants and customer-service reps who've retained this one venue where we can air-guitar the berserk discourse of a warrior race. We're Klingons, but only on Sundays."

For my own year-end list, though, I'm sharing some of the best sports pieces written by women (at least the ones I've read and enjoyed), along with a few non-sports stories, too. I'm singling out female writers because not enough female writers get singled out. Part of this is because, statistically speaking, there are so many more men writing about sports. But I also believe there tends to be more showmanship -- more look at me, I'm writing -- on the part of the male writers who frequently tout each other's work on social media. The lopsided nature of most of these lists is because sports media is still a boy's club. Very few women work in executive, decision-making roles on the editorial side, so cultivating and growing female voices is still less of a priority than it should be, as is attaching female writers to impactful, meaningful topics -- and not just stories about women or subjects that need a "softer" touch.   

All "best of" lists should be taken with a grain of salt, obviously, because one person's great read is another person's snoozefest. The problem is, the paucity of women on these lists, year in and year out, delivers a specific message to young female sportswriters: Yes, the door is open to you, but just barely.  

Before diving in, I should also note that I tend to notice stories and essays that are about more than just sports -- themes that exist at that crossroads where sports and social issues meet. So if you think I've missed something really good, a piece that deserves more love, hit me up on Twitter.

And now, in no particular order … 

*Trial By Twitter by Ariel Levy

"After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served. Was it?" I will now read every piece of writing that Levy puts out into the world. On that note, her essay Thanksgiving in Mongolia, about how she lost her baby, was the most beautiful and gut-wrenching piece of writing I read in 2013. There are almost too many heartbreaking lines from which to choose, but this is one of the best: "The truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen."

*Fallon Fox: The Toughest Woman in Sports by Nancy Hass

Fox is one of the most interesting women in sports, and this absorbing profile is filled with smart observations like this one: "Arguably there's no safe place in the world for a woman who was born a male, but some places are safer than others. You can head for an anything-goes enclave like San Francisco or either of the Portlands, or maybe a Vermont hamlet where people keep to themselves. But here is one destination you probably want to avoid: an octagonal metal cage with a sweat-slick canvas and 3,000 testosterone-jacked ticket holders yelling for your blood."

*Do Svidaniya to All That by Katie Baker

This was a fun, accessible, extremely well-writen story about Baker's trip to check out the pro hockey scene in Russia, which happened to overlap with the end of the NHL lockout. Of course, the piece was also about a foreigner navigating Russia. On the adventure of ordering at a McDonald's, Baker writes: "You wait in the not-quite-a-line, and when it's your turn you ask, 'English?' and a few sets of eyes settle sideways on you. You're given a giant laminated picture-rich menu that looks like it was developed for cognitive studies on children or dolphins." (This feature also resonated with me because I had just returned from my own trip to Russia, where I was reporting a story on the Spartak tennis academy in Moscow. It was a fascinating week, but I'm sad to say I won't be going back anytime soon, as long as Vladimir Putin continues to push for laws discriminating against gays.)

*Still Moving Reflexively in the Rubble by Bonnie Ford

This was the definitive column about Lance Armstrong's fall from grace, from one of the best sportswriters working today. The line that stuck with me all year came about three-quarters of the way down: "I find Lance Armstrong reprehensible for having passed off fiction as documentary. Two dear friends of mine had their bodies sliced up, pumped with chemicals and radiated, but they still wasted away before my eyes and died, the disease feasting on their bones like soft fruit, flooding their lungs, robbing them of their voices and keen intellects and finally stopping their generous hearts." 

*You Can Only Hope to Contain Them by Amanda Hess

Five years in, ESPN The Magazine's annual Body Issue still has a knack for surprises. And yes, I'm talking about the stories, not the photos. David Fleming is a master of body reportage, as he proved in 2010 with It Happens and 2012 with Call of Booty. And this year, Hess stepped to the plate in a big way with her entertaining look at breasts. A sample line: "And in the rare case that a breast is on full display, all hell can break loose. Even as Carmouche was threatening to break her neck, Rousey felt as if her falling bra was a life-or-death situation too. If she failed to get a grip, 'I'd be morbidly embarrassed,' she says."

*Tomato Can Blues by Mary Pilon

Part of the allure of this piece is the illustrations, the graphic-novel style. But equally remarkable is the way that Pilon writes to fit that style. I love how she doesn't get in the way. She has a story to tell, and she doesn't get caught up trying to be a writerly writer.  To wit: "He was what the boxing world used to call a 'tomato can.' The term's origins are unclear, but perhaps it's as simple as this: knock a tomato can over, and red stuff spills out." 

*Failure Is Not An Option by Mimi Schwartz

This feature about former University of Texas track coach Bev Kearney, who was forced to resign, made several best-of lists, for good reason. Kearney is, to say the least, a complicated protagonist. "Dressed in faded sweats, her face makeup-free, Kearney had the plainness of a penitent," Schwartz writes. "But it wasn't in her nature to let grief take over; two iPads, a laptop, and an iPhone beeped and pinged around the perimeter of her chair, competing with the small, burbling serenity fountain a few feet away."

*The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap by Eve Pell

Admittedly, this one is only tangentially about sports -- the theme is finding love in old age -- but it packs an emotional punch in a tidy 1,000 words. "We followed our hearts and gambled," Pell writes, "and for a few years we had a bit of heaven on earth." 

***

And here are some of my other favorite pieces of the year, the non-sports variety … 

*An Open Letter to White Male Comedians by Lindy West

*Good Will Hunting: An Oral History by Janelle Nanos

*The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer by Sabrina Rubin Erdely 

*My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters by Deborah Copaken Kogan

*How Jenna Lyons Transformed J. Crew Into A Cult Brand by Danielle Sacks

*Your Friends and Rapists by Sarah Nicole Prickett

*Depression Part Two by Allie Brosh

*That Sex Scene on Last Night's "Girls" by Emily Nussbaum. (This is wonderful reading if you watch the HBO series, and it paired nicely with Jezebel's day-after take by Tracie Egan Morrissey: What Kind of Guy Does a Girl Who Looks Like Lena Dunham 'Deserve'? There is something wonderful about a critique that points out the flaws in your own thinking and reactions.)

Anything Like a Story at All

Last May, I sold a book, a memoir titled The Reappearing Act.

The story focuses on two years of my life—my junior and senior seasons playing basketball at the University of Colorado—when I was trying so hard to reconcile my sexuality with the rock-solid beliefs of my Christian teammates, as well as my own exploration of religious faith. (You can read an excerpt of the book here: Chapter 11.)  

I wrote the book over the summer, much of it while sitting on the balcony of the Brooklyn apartment I share with my partner. Occasionally, I would pause and stare off in the distance, at One World Trade Center rising above lower Manhattan. The writing itself was easy, surprisingly. I was like a wind-up toy that just needed some space, and off I’d go. I would write 2,500 words in five hours, sometimes less—and then I would crash. 

Because living in the past is exhausting.

Sometime in late August, about a month before the book was due, I decided to watch the documentary “Stories We Tell” by filmmaker and actress Sarah Polley. The movie “explores the elusive nature of truth and memory”—a theme that seemed to dovetail perfectly with my own immersion in the murky details of my coming of age, my attempt to resurrect The Truth, always such a slippery thing. 

As the opening credits of the film flashed upon the screen, I was checking Twitter, or maybe texting, or possibly petting my French bulldog, Jaxie. (In other words, a typical night in Park Slope.) But then the craggy voice of the narrator, and his English accent, caught my attention. I did not know at the time, but he was reading a quote from the novel Alias Grace, written by Margaret Atwood. The words were perfect. They conveyed a truth about stories and storytelling—not fiction, but the kind you live through and share—that I had never before thought to define. 

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

I quickly hit "rewind" and listened again. Then I wrote down the quote. Then I found its author. A wreckage of shattered glass … Yes! A dark roaring, a blindness … That is exactly how my life had felt back then!

As summer flew by, as the writing flew by, those long-ago emotions—a combination of fear, shame, confusion, hopelessness—would hit me, vibrations from the past. I actually welcomed everything that the writing churned to the surface, because I had never processed certain interactions, instead choosing to pretend they had never happened. Of course, you can’t lie to your heart. Everything costs something, even if you decide to defer payment.   

Now, the book is finished. And I feel so much better. Not because the writing is done—although that does feel good—but because I’ve taken the house in a whirlwind and set it down, so it's no longer crashing around my insides. I started thinking, too, about how helpful it is to tell the story, to write it or say it aloud, to give other people the chance to understand some intrinsic part of me.

At first, early in the process, I was going to call the book The Disappearing Act, although that never felt quite right. When I shared some preliminary sections with my partner, Sue, she took one look at the title, shook her head, and then—not two seconds later—suggested The Reappearing Act. That felt more accurate, more meaningful.

In writing the story, I realized just how dependent I had been on the examples set by others in my life. I had told myself, during that tumultuous time in college, that living authentically wasn't an option, largely because the world of women's college basketball was, and still is, so closeted. My solution was to split my life in two, keeping one foot in the closet. Being true to yourself is scary, nearly impossible, if you don’t see others doing the same.

Even after I became a sportswriter, I worried that being out could hurt my career, so I continued to keep walls around myself for several years. Then one day I found out that a high-profile female journalist was gay, and it felt like I’d been handed a blank check. A few months later, I met a prominent openly gay editor, then after that another writer I admired. It was a snowball effect, in a wonderful way. The strength of these people became mine, too. Simply by being themselves, they allowed me to believe that the life I wanted was possible.

So now I'm making a space to share some of those stories, to share other people’s reappearing acts—to show when and how and why they decided to step fully out of the closet and live authentically.

And I’ll post some of those stories here: Your Reappearing Act. 

--If you want to share your story, email me at kfagan3 at gmail dot com.

Owning the Middle

By Kate Fagan

Brittney Griner wants to know if anyone will recognize her.

The world's most famous female basketball player tucks her dreadlocks into a gray hoodie, slides on bright yellow sunglasses and hunches her shoulders, trying to knock an inch or two off her 6-foot-8 frame. "If you didn't already know it was me, would you know it was me?" she asks, laughing. She ducks out of the Yankee Stadium press box, hoping to make it to a concession stand for chicken fingers and crinkle fries without stopping to sign autographs or take photos.

The disguise does the trick. Dozens of people crane their necks, but nobody shouts her name or approaches. Food in hand, Griner walks to Section 226, slips into her aisle seat overlooking the third-base line and dunks a chicken strip into barbecue sauce. "I think this hoodie thing worked," she says, nodding happily. "Maybe I'll try it again."

One night earlier, on April 15, the Phoenix Mercury made the 22-year-old center from Baylor the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, generating a new wave of attention for a player who already was turning heads. On the court, Griner brings a blend of size and skill not seen before in the women's game. Off it, she has taken the unprecedented step of coming out publicly at the start of her pro career, allowing her to build her own brand -- she is the first openly gay athlete to sign with Nike -- while influencing the marketing of an entire league.

Hiding in the open is a fun game for Griner now, akin to concealing a giraffe in a meadow. But she gets a far greater thrill from being exactly the person she wants to be for the first time in her life. She has long exuded a gender-bending vibe, yet the player who led her team to a national championship and dunked her way into the highlights was merely a muted version of her true self. Now, the real Griner is appearing as if in Technicolor 3-D, shouting her truth to the rafters.

"I am 100-percent happy," she says. "When I was at Baylor, I wasn't fully happy because I couldn't be all the way out. It feels so good saying it: I am a strong, black lesbian woman. Every single time I say it, I feel so much better."

--To keep reading this article from espnW.com and ESPN The Magazine, click here: Owning the Middle. 

What Brittney Griner Says About Us

By Kate Fagan

Over the past four years, a certain segment of "fans" in this country have played a silly little game called, unofficially, "What We Say About Brittney Griner."

The way it works is simple. No matter what Griner does -- win the NCAA championship with Baylor, earn national player of the year honors, break her wrist skateboarding, drop 50 points on Kansas State -- the naysayers hop on message boards and social media to deliver a variety of insults, questioning her fierce on-court demeanor, her talent in comparison to male players, even her genetic makeup.

Rather than embracing Griner as a gift from the basketball gods, a player years ahead of her time, they have turned her into a 6-foot-8 lightning rod for all of their complaints and fears about the women's game.

And over the next few weeks, as Griner tries to cap her record-setting college career by winning a second straight national title, it's a pretty good bet that whatever praise she receives will also come with a side dish of scorn -- because her best seems to bring out some people's worst.

Truth is, those ugly things they say about Brittney Griner aren't really about her.

They're about us.

To keep reading this article on espnW.com, please click here: What Brittney Griner Says About Us. 

The Feminization of Bill Laimbeer

By Kate Fagan

Bill Laimbeer wants to know if I've seen the movie "A Few Good Men."

"Of course," I say. "Who hasn't?"

We are sitting in a conference room at the Madison Square Garden Training Center, in Tarrytown, N.Y., about 25 miles north of the real MSG. The 6-foot-11 Laimbeer, who is in his first season as head coach and general manager of the New York Liberty, leans so far back in his chair that he's almost parallel to the ground, the spine of the chair straining from the effort. With a gentle flick of his right wrist, he spins an orange-and-cream-colored basketball into the air, catches it, and softly launches it again.

"He's Tom Cruise," says Liberty assistant coach Taj McWilliams-Franklin.

"And this is my bat," Laimbeer says, holding the WNBA ball in his palm, underhand, as if offering it to me. Then he tosses it off the white wall and catches it. (In the movie, Cruise's character does his best thinking when holding a baseball bat.)

"He freaks out if the ball isn't somewhere in the room," says Barb Farris, the Liberty's other assistant coach. She and McWilliams-Franklin played for Laimbeer with the Detroit Shock.

Laimbeer is at the head of the conference table, occasionally leaning forward to scribble reminders for practice ("360-degree jump passes -- NO!") or diagrams of plays on the large dry-erase board. On the table is the scouting report for the Indiana Fever, the Liberty's opponent the next evening, in a mid-July matchup of struggling Eastern Conference teams trying to stay in the playoff race.

The door of the meeting room is open, and players wander past as they arrive for practice, some stopping to say hello. After each brief interruption, Laimbeer and his staff return to the task at hand, dissecting the team's deficiencies and singling out some of those very same players. "We don't have enough of them who can think the game," he says.

The 56-year-old talks about hoops as if he invented it, as if everyone views basketball the way he does: in slow motion. When watching film or practice, he easily untangles the cluster of motion and spots the moment when it all falls apart. ("Right there! Why are we trailing that cross-screen?!") Or when it clicks. ("See? We're most efficient when we get her that pick on the wing.")

--To continue reading this story from espnW.com, please click here: The Feminization of Bill Laimbeer.