Michael Lewis made me care about left tackles and Shane Battier

Attending Notre Dame has changed my interest in sports journalism. When I say changed, I mean that at the beginning of my freshman year, the ND sports machine took me by the shoulders and shook me violently and exclaimed, "Why haven't you read this great stuff before? Can't you see what you're missing?" From the mythic Grantland Rice and the "four horsemen" to the men's basketball write-ups in The Observer's sports section, I really started to see the art in sports writing. You have to condense a game - either a single contest or the entire genre - into words. And you have to do in a way that will make people read the story, not just scan it for scores and rankings.


Sports features in particular always grab my attention. This is usually because I'm prone to choosing sides for arbitrary reasons: I think it's awesome that Mike Anello is my generation's Rudy (only more athletic), so I scream his name on kick-offs, and cheer like he's one of the Beatles when we hear he got a tackle. I love that Xue Shao and Hongbo Zhen, the eventual gold medalist pairs figure skaters from China, were happily married when they decided to come out of retirement and train for the 2010 Winter Olympics. While stats and physical prowess are really impressive, I'm a sucker for the human-interest angle.


A year ago, my journalism teacher - Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune, if we're into name dropping - sent our class a link to New York Times magazine story about Houston Rockets defensive genius Shane Battier. I balked at the story's length, which was something like 15 pages or so after I reformatted the text in Microsoft Word. But I sat down and read the whole thing, enthralled with this character Battier. He's a cerebral defensive player, meticulously studying his opponents' offensive habits. But his efforts often go unnoticed because his tactics can't be quantified in the stats box. The author does a good job of analyzing and explaining just how Battier is integral yet ignored:

Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.

The author goes on to dissect the odds, the percentages and the processes that define Battier's awesomeness, all in a way that I can understand, even as a relative newbie to the sports journalism world.

I bring up this story because this past Christmas break I read The Blind Side and had the feeling that I was reading a damn good piece of sports journalism wrapped up in an inspiring, book-length human interest feature story. And the style - the gameplay breakdowns, the detailed analysis of the game stats, the methodical yet musical prose - reminded me so much of that NYT magazine story I read the year before. Surprise, surprise, they were both written by Michael Lewis. His excellent writing style coupled with an outstanding ability to repackage highly specialized information into a readable format makes for some truly enjoyable and informative reading.


If you haven't picked up one of his books or read any of his stuff yet, I highly recommend it. When  I read The Blind Side (I still have yet to see the movie), I learned more about the value of offensive linemen and the position of left tackle than I'll ever be able to use in real life, but it sure helps when I'm having friendly arguments with The Observer's sports staff during layout production nights at the office.