For almost fifty years, Bud Collins has ranked as one of America's premier sports journalists, best known for his tennis commentary on NBC and his sports column in the Boston Globe. From surfing to golf, baseball to bodybuilding, Collins's selections for this tenth anniversary edition celebrate sports of all stripes, in pieces by H. G. Bissinger, Charles P. Pierce, Jim Harrison, Rick Reilly, and others.

Foreword Where is sport without the words that surround it? Every day a thousand games are played a million times and pass by. Sweat is shed by the bucket as wins and losses peel off in laughter and cheers. Tears fall every second and disappear. Words preserve sport, the taste and smell of it. We remember not the simple exercise, but the result and reason why it matters at all, or why it doesn't. With the words as our guide, we follow and learn. As I read these stories each year, I find myself caring about someone, something, or some sport I know little about and couldn't have imagined ever wanting to know more about. A writer, by way of words alone, has made this happen, something so surprising and delightful that even the familiar sometimes becomes extraordinary, and the exotic moves close at hand. And I read on. My daughter has grown up with the detritus of this endless project all around her. In our home, piles of newspapers, magazines, and thick manila envelopes fill the places that in other houses are occupied by -- oh, I don't know -- potted plants, knickknacks, and knockoffs. Over the course of putting together The Best American Sports Writing 2001, I've watched her grow from almost four to almost five and begin to read. It has been astonishing to watch letters become words and sentences become stories. And she gets lost in other worlds. So do I. Still. The experience of creating these books has taken me from smoke-filled rooms in Las Vegas to hospital beds and penitentiaries, from mountain peaks to swamps and ocean wrecks, to locker rooms, playing fields, horse stalls, and a hundred other places. The best part of creation, and, I suspect, reading, is the pleasure that comes from being transported outside ourselves to elsewhere. We become happily lost while finding something lasting in what otherwise -- without the words -- would remain the unexplored. Most games go unwatched, and athletes remain anonymous. Even the fans'most rabid obsession disregards more than it includes. Whether or not my team or my sport or your team or your sport appears in this book is, thankfully, immaterial. Final scores do not often matter here. This is not a book of results or an encyclopedia. Neither is it an awards ceremony, a testimonial, or a competition. The collective words of the writers in this book are an invitation, a conversation with those we'll never meet about things we wouldn't otherwise experience. Sports is the most subtle of hooks here, one that by the first sentence begins to be unwrapped by language and made into something we do care about. Here is a place where Parts Otherwise Unknown are made familiar. I suppose that is because the writers both care and use care to let us know that. When they don't, I can tell and fill landfills with their poor directions. But when they do and whisper in our ear and let us in on the secret, this slim book swells and we find our way. Without the words, I sometimes wonder whether there is such a thing as sports at all. So where is sport? A part of it is here, in the words that follow. Just listen. Every season of this process, I read every issue of hundreds of sports and general interest magazines in search of writing that might merit inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing. I try not to miss anything, so each year I also contact the sports editors of some three hundred newspapers and request their submissions. Similarly, I ask hundreds of magazine editors to provide complimentary subscriptions and submissions of individual stories. But none of us is perfect. That is why I encourage writers, readers, and all other interested parties to send me stories they've writte