In some ways I’m a terrible sportswriter, because I’m deeply suspicious of the desire to win. Like, maybe it’s a bad thing on balance. The desire to dominate someone else is probably something we should not encourage.
From her time answering the phone at the Washington Post as a student to get game results from high school basketball managers to manually input box scores, to discovering poetry (“and friends”) in college, to author, to Grantland and now a staff writer at The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas’s route to sports writing is circuitous in the sense of the meanders it took, but still, in the way people destined by their talent and interest tend to be, pretty direct and determined.
But that’s sort of the point of Louisa’s writing. It gets at the heart of a subject, be it a person or a game, by writing around the main thing. Sports are, or can be, a Trojan Horse for bringing in broader cultural conversations to discussions around the game. Things like politics, history, art, feelings, these are the kinds of things that sportswriting can open up and in some ways for some fans, offer an entry point to those things from a place where they’re already comfortable and willing to engage. It’s something I try do in my own work, and find so fascinating, which is probably why I love Louisa’s writing so much (I’ll also say she always ends up landing on the exact heart of the main thing, after leading us all around it).
We talked about that! We talked about the timing of careers, common language around sports, kids and sports, competition getting trained out of young girls, the pureness of competition in Jimmy Butler, losers in sports, the rich territory of loss, and the humanity it stirs up in us. We also talked about highlights from the season, Nikola Jokic as upender to the traditional approach to competition, probability in basketball (accounting for luck vs. skill), her time embedded alongside the Spurs during the 2014 playoffs, and why the NBA sometimes appears to think that basketball isn’t enough.
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