Sports: The Greatest Esquire Stories of All Time, Volume 3

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The greatest sports stories transcend sports. They are about risk and failure and craft, and the joy and wonder that come from watching a human being reach for grace. They are about us. This third volume of Esquire’s eightieth-anniversary anthology series showcases eight of the finest such stories in the magazine’s history.

The collection kicks off with David Foster Wallace’s whip-smart tennis masterpiece “The String Theory” . It’s a story of obsession—regarding baseline play, unforced errors, and sweat mixed with hair gel. But it’s also about why at heart we are all like his subject, Michael Joyce—in the middle of the pack, struggling to reach the top. Next is “Gorgeous Dan,” by John Irving , a beautiful and heartbreaking story about what it means to be the greatest wrestler of all time: you have to be perfect. It’s a pressure that another figure in this collection—Don Zimmer—knew all too well; Scott Raab’s profile of Zimmer, from 2001, is brimming with as much passion for baseball and life as its indomitable bald-headed subject.

Then there are the personalities who shape the world to their own talent and whim and raw power, like the boxer in W. C. Heinz’s classic “Young Fighter,” from 1955. Or racing legend Junior Johnson: There are enough roaring engines, moonshine, and exclamation points in Tom Wolfe’s 1965 classic “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” to power a million NASCAR races. Or the last truly great Yankee badass, Thurman Munson: Michael Paterniti’s wrenching, unforgettable story “The House That Thurman Munson Built” is as much about the end of childhood as it’s about Munson’s tragic death, because our athletes are often what fuel our dreams of the impossible. And yet, as Luke Dittrich so deftly and beautifully shows in “Mutant” , his profile of sprinter Usain Bolt, even the world’s fastest human, playing video games, eating Jamaican patty, dancing, and smiling, is very much one of us.

Finally, there’s Ted Williams, proof that ambition never dies. “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” , by Richard Ben Cramer, is quite simply the greatest sports story of all time, by one of America’s greatest journalists. There couldn’t be a better representative of eighty years of sportswriting in Esquire. These eight stories are shot through with aspiration and fear, sweat and blood, and they say as much about our perpetual human quest for greatness as they do about our love of sports.