Goal!

When you develop a fondness for a particular magazine writer, sometimes you begin to realize that you share their interests. Not many writers, of course, get to write about what interests them. In the never-ending battle to put food on the table, writers must deal with very high levels of rejection and frustration. When you are a writer, there are stories you really want to do, but you soon come to the rather defeatist conclusion that no one else on the planet—least of all your editors—see them for the brilliant ideas they are. And so you scrape together story pitches you know they will be interested in, and to varying degrees you feel your soul leeching away.

A sort of upper-ring of purgatory in the writing game is having a job you basically like, where you aren’t required to actually freelance to keep the wolf from the door. Then you get the occasional phone call from someone somewhere who digs your style and wants you to write something for them. You can say yes, you can say no—but you call the shots based on your interest and availability. A very wise person once told us: Never do anything just for the money. That’s all well and good, but freelance writers will starve on advice like that. But perhaps they’ll starve happy.

Anyway, in the midst of this cold snap, we were gratified to read Charles McGrath’s review of “The Boys of Winter,” in the Times Book Review. The last time we saw McGrath’s byline was a very nicely done profile of Tom Wolfe for the Times magazine. Normally, we think it’s silly to try to mimick the style of one’s subject, when one’s subject is an intensely idiosyncratic stylist like Tom Wolfe. But McGrath pulled it off nicely, and he knew precisely when to stop with the—damn! can’t breath! is that the sound of my own heartbeat? or rat-a-tat-tat of Compaq laptop genius, hold fast! (The main reason we got interested in Wolfe’s new book at all, and dedicated practically a whole week to this pulpish timesink before wisely putting it aside, was McGrath’s profile in the magazine, and Jacob Weisberg’s critique in the Book Review, two of the most memorable magazine pieces in the past six months.)

It’s fun to think that McGrath can turn from a playful profile of a dandy irritant like Wolfe to the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, and that’s what he does here. We can’t think of a less timely, less necessary book, but McGrath finds a way to write about hockey that is fresh, fun, and interesting. It makes us realize just how impoverished we are in the world of sports writing. Compare, for example, the print journalism in Great Britain that rumbles along with the English Premier football league. (On our top-ten books of all time: this little-read Hornby volume, his first published book.) It’s not just a matter of recording the goals and the hooligans. It’s a matter of recreating the gutter-level myths of the game, and making a record of the intense emotional ups and downs. It’s about What It All Means, and you just don’t see that very much in American sports writing. (Baseball has, over the years, had many memorable practitioners. But why should those guys have a monopoly on the art? It’s not as if baseball is inherently more interesting or complex than, say, boxing or fencing or soccer.)

In his review of Wayne Coffey’s new book, McGrath makes it clear that where Coffey excels is in artfully describing the game of hockey itself. The best way to do this is to approximate the play-by-play action of a specific game, rather than attempt any sort of grandiose poetry of the sport taken as a whole. And the 1980 upset over the Soviets is not just a legendary moment in sport, politics, and international relations. It is a mythic game looked at strictly as three periods of ice hockey. Of course, it’s necessary to set the stage—and that requires a lot of interesting analysis of the team dynamic (lots of tension between the stoic Minnesotans and the ballbusting New Englanders; an angel-devil rivalry between Wisconsin coach Bob Johnson and Minnesota coach Herb Brooks, and so on). Coffey apparently pulls it off, and so does McGrath…. fine examples of writers who have achieved the rare privelege of being allowed to write anything they please, and keep renewing that privelege with great stories. We wish others could write this well about the cliche-ridden world of professional sports. Failing that, they might for the sake of human decency, stop trying.