KNYGA David Macfarlane On Sports

What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?On Sports reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels like the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It’s about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, how much work it takes for talent to shine, and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of good sports copy, the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story, and how sport remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports suffocates the last of it; and it’s about where that spirit today is best found.