75 Great Sports Articles - Examples of Excellent Sports Writing

The best short articles and essays about sports from around the net

Basketball

Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved? by Ross Gay

On the Unlikely Tenderness and Care of a Good Pick-Up Basketball Game

We Are Grown Men Playing a Child's Game
by Gilbert Rogin

The bearded man laughing at his daughter is Bill Russell, the most remarkable basketball player of our time. Sport, however, is one of his lesser interests. Here are his trenchant, often angry observations on today's Negro-white crisis and his role in it

Shoot the Moon by Susan Orlean

White men in suits follow Felipe Lopez everywhere he goes. They are ubiquitous. They rarely miss one of Felipe's games or tournaments...

The No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis

His greatness is not marked in box scores or at slam-dunk contests, but on the court Shane Battier makes his team better, often much better, and his opponents worse, often much worse.

Three-Man Weave by Chuck Klosterman

There are underdog stories...and there's what happened in North Dakota in 1988

A History of Flight by Wright Thompson

Michael Jordan might not be the most famous person on the planet anymore, decades after he last put on those shorts and took the court, but as the person has faded, the idea of him has somehow remained powerful and bright...

Under the Knife by Baxter Holmes

Exposing America's youth basketball crisis

Baseball

The Trading Desk by Michael Lewis

For the past four years, working with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, the Oakland A's have won as many regular-season games as almost any other team. How on earth did they do it?

Baseball for Life by Sara Corbett

People have accepted that it's O.K. for a talented 7- or 8-year-old gymnast to go away and not see her family at all, but for a baseball player to do anything close to that, it's like, 'Oh, my God, that's terrible!'

The Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton

You can hardly see the blur of it as it goes by. As for hitting the thing, frankly, I just don't think it's humanly possible

Football

The Ballad of Big Mike by Michael Lewis

Every other high-school football player in America was dying for Lemming to invite him to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. Michael Oher had left his invitation on the table…

Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger

Outside, the August night was cool and serene, with just a wisp of West Texas wind. Inside, there was a sense of excitement and also relief, for the waiting was basically over...

Game Brain by Jeanne Marie Laskas

Let's say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let's concussions are making your players crazy. What would you do?

G-L-O-R-Y! by Jeanne Marie Laskas

The hot, peppy, underpaid world of the NFL cheerleaders

There's No Crying at the Pee Wee Super Bowl by Jeanne Marie Laskas

The biggest little game in the world...

Someone to Lean On by Gary Smith

How an 18-year-old with mental disabilities changed a high school football program in South Carolina.

Soccer

The Istanbul Derby by Spencer Hall

Soccer, fire and a game at the world's crossroads

The Beautiful Game by Patrick Symmes

In Argentina, rival soccer fans don’t just hate, they kill, and the violent partisans of top clubs fuel crime syndicates that influence the sport at its highest levels...

The Silicon Valley of Turf by William Ralston

How the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football

How the Story of Soccer Became the Story of Everything by Tim Murphy

Oligarchs, private-equity moguls, and petro states took over the sport—and the world

Tennis

Federer as Religious Experience
by David Foster Wallace

The world of top-flight tennis, and arguably its greatest exponent

The String Theory by David Foster Wallace

An obsessive inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of tennis

Why Do Tennis Crowds Have to Be So Quiet? by Dan Nosowitz

The game’s long, weird, elitist history provides some clues.

What's in and What's Out by Kevin Nguyen

Tennis is making big bets on it's future

Running

Is the Fastest Human Ever Already Alive? by Chuck Klosterman

Allow me to spare you the hyperbole: Usain Bolt is fast...

The Fast Life of Oscar Pistorius by Michael Sokolove

Should a double amputee be allowed to race against the world's best able-bodied athletes, or could his disability offer him an unfair advantage?

Runner, Interrupted by Frank Bures

Running took him from Kenya to Alaska, and gave him a shot at a better life. But then Marko Cheseto disappeared during a run one snowy winter night...

Either/Or by Ariel Levy

How world-class sprinter Caster Semenya puts the idea of binary genders into question.

Twelve Minutes and a Life by Mitchell S. Jackson

Ahmaud Arbery went out for a jog and was gunned down in the street. How running fails Black America

Going the Distance (and Beyond) to Catch Marathon Cheaters by Gordy Megroz

Derek Murphy investigates runners whose times seem suspicious, which is what brought him to a 70-year-old doctor named Frank Meza

Cricket

Why You Should Care about Cricket by Wright Thompson

Cricket, like India, had long intrigued me from afar. It seemed so mysterious: a game with strange rules, and stranger vocabulary, one that can last for days, captivating billions but meriting only an inch or two in the papers at home.

Runs in the Family by David Papineau

Cricketing dynasties seem to imply that talent is genetic. Yet the evidence from other sports queers the pitch.

Misc.

The Sea of Crises by Brian Phillips

On sumo, ritual suicide and the death of samurai culture

A Fighter Abroad by Brian Phillips

In 1810, a freed slave named Tom Molineaux fought in one of the most important fights in the history of boxing. This is his story...

What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture by Derek Thompson

You can make a thing so perfect that it’s ruined

How Long Can We Play? by Chris Ballard

Inside the quest to prolong athletic mortality...

Alone at the Edge of the World by Cassidy Randall

Susie Goodall wanted to circumnavigate the globe in her sailboat without stopping. She didn’t bargain for what everyone else wanted.

How Fit Can You Get From Just Walking? by Graham Isador

Walking is good for you, obviously. But can it whip you into shape?

Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National by Nick Paumgarten

The home of the Masters Tournament is a prelapsarian golf paradise, combining good manners and Southern delights with exclusion and self-satisfaction

Triumph Of The Swoosh by Donald Katz

With a keen sense of the power of sports and a genius for mythologizing athletes to help sell sneakers, Nike bestrides the world of sport like a marketing colossus

Getting into Esports by John Lanchester

I remember, back at the start of lockdown, trying to draw up a rough mental ledger of things I would miss...

Why Sports Are for Losers by Matti Taibbi

"There is a dirty truth that professional sports keeps hidden from fans, i.e., guys like you and me who spend winter after winter wondering, What if? And that truth is: Watching sports sucks"

Adventure Sports

Why We Play by Eva Holland

Doing what we love, despite the risks

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

I understood on some dim, detached level that it was a spectacular sight, but now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care

Unclimbable by Eva Holland

An expedition to the Cirque of the Unclimbables -- some of the toughest, most spectacular climbing in the world

The Mountain of Mountains by Kevin Fedarko

The afternoon I stumbled across the human leg bone at the bottom of K2, it was one of those flawless days you almost never see in the Karakoram

Out in the Great Alone by Brian Phillips

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race pushes participants to the brink on an unforgiving trek to the end of the world

Kashmiri Extremism by Kevin Fedarko

It's 4:00 a.m., and outside the fog-shrouded windows of the Kashmir Alpine Ski Shop, the Indian village of Gulmarg sleeps in the shadow of a 13,576-foot ridge that looks directly into Pakistan

The Fast Track to Dharma by Michael Paterniti

60 Degrees Straight Down, Mind the Boulders and Avalanches. A postcard from La Grave, France - alpinism's new lost horizon

Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky by Matthew Power

By day they work as computer programmers and stock boys and academics. But at night they are urban explorers

The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver by Daniel Riley

With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports

Precipice of Fear by Simon Akam

The freerider who took skiing to its limits

Surfing

Life's Swell by Susan Orlean

To be a surfer girl in Maui is to be the luckiest of creatures. It means you're beautiful and tan and ready to rip. It means you've caught the perfect dappled wave and are on a ride that can't possibly end...

The Wave-Maker by William Langewiesche

A 58-year-old maverick's record-breaking encounter with 85 feet of "Condition Black" water

Off Diamond Head by William Finnegan

To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii

Playing Doc's Games by William Finnegan

On surfing San Francisco (part 2 is here)

Mavericks by Alice Gregory

Life and death surfing

Is That Even a Sport??

The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!
by Tom Wolfe

Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars...

My Month of Doing 100 Wheelies a Day by Kim Cross

What the wheelie lacks in utility it makes up for with pure, unfiltered radness...

Maximum Speed! by Joshua Foer

Over in Germany, water sliding is serious sport.

Horse Racing

The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved
by Hunter S. Thompson

I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath...