Almanac Book Review – Hanif Abdurraqib, The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025

 

Hanif Abdurraqib (ed.), The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025, Triumph Books, Chicago, 2025, xviii + 324 pp., paperback, US $21.95.

What do they know of sport who only sport they know?

(With apologies to C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary.)

 

Sport is most interesting when it is not about sport, when it is about something more than sport, when it provides insights into the human condition; who we are as a people, what drives us, how we interact. I always look forward to the next installment of The Year’s Best Sports Writing series to read recent musings by a range of writers, who I have invariably never encountered before, on our engagement with sport. The 2025 edition is edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, essayist and cultural critic. In 2024 he published There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, a New York Times bestseller.

 

Previous issues of The Best have contained 25 essays. 2025 breaks with this tradition with 30, exploring different aspects of more than 20 sports. A usual staple of sports writing is to focus on the exploits of star players and star teams. This volume has some examples of this – tennis’s Rafael Nadal, two female basketball players (Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese), female hurdler (Sydney McLaughlin) and a female Algerian boxer (more of her later). The major focus of 2025 is on agency; of how sport is one of the ways in which we strive to achieve; to prove our worth – more to ourselves than to others; to provide meaning to our lives.

 

Such striving can have a dark side; can become an obsession which can result in injury and death to those caught in its grip. These dangers are illustrated in essays on backcountry skiing, extreme hiking and young girls starving themselves – and sometimes (too often!) committing suicide – in pursuing a ballet career. Obsession can also extend to spending (wasting) a small fortune on the purchase of basketball cards.

 

Then again obsession may be a means to overcome grief and despair. One of the contributors describes how he found regularly playing chess provided him with the mental discipline to take his mind off the misery he experienced following his mother’s death. This essay can be contrasted with a Native American whose mother was taken away and adopted out (what in Australia we would call the ‘Stolen Generations’) who found peace when she returned to her homeland (‘Country’) and constructed a skateboard which provided the young with something challenging and fun to do which, at the same time, enhanced community cohesion.

 

One of the longest essays is by the professional wrestler Ettore Ewen, the ‘Big E’ of ‘The New Day’. He describes how he was brought up in a strict household and his hope that a football scholarship to the University of Iowa would provide him with a ‘brighter’ future. His football career never developed because of persistent injuries. He became depressed and lost. A coach noticed this and directed him to therapy which turned his life around. To its credit, the Iowa football program continued his scholarship despite his injuries. He subsequently found his way into professional wrestling. The ‘Big E’ takes us into this world, the making of ‘wrestling brands’ and his enhanced sense of self-worth.

 

Several of the essays explore issues associated with gender and agency. These range from how star female basketball players provide inspiration for lesbians, the hue and cry associated with a transwoman on a college volleyball team, an African American trans basketball league which provided a safe place for trans players, and engagement with broader discussions on the non-binary nature of gender.

 

Two of the essays deal with African American agency. One is concerned with attempts to raise money to refurbish a tennis club in Chicago, the first such African American club in America. The second deconstructs African American roller skating styles, with a carnival in Atlanta being the highlight in the Black roller skating calendar.

 

Three of the essays deal with the strictures that operate on non-western, essentially non-white women in sport. The first concerns a group of Afghanistan young women who take up bike riding as a means of enhancing their independence, mobility (quicker than walking) and as competitive sport. The ability to continue this ended when the Taliban resumed power in Afghanistan. The essay describes how they managed to escape from Afghanistan. The second concerns how bans on Muslim women wearing hijabs in international competitions represents Western bias and has a chilling effect on Muslim women taking up sport.

 

The third concerns the female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif who won a gold medal at the Paris 2024 Olympics. This victory of a Muslim women of colour was heavily criticised in the West with insinuations that she was transgender or a man. Niharika Pandit, a sociology lecturer from Queen Mary University at London – and I am fairly sure that this is the first time that a sociology lecturer has found their way into The Best – provides a trenchant critique of such attitudes, which she links to notions of colonialism.

 

Some colonized and racialized peoples, especially Black people, were thingified and dehumanized to the extent of being violently expelled from the realm of humanity. Reducing gender to heterosexist control made the colonized subjects, lifeworlds, land, and ecologies available for capture, extraction, control and decimation (p. 219).

 

There are four essays which deal with more metaphysical issues involving sport, which to my mind gives this volume its cutting edge. Zito Madu is concerned with the death of children playing football in Gaza. In despairing about this he sees something, almost mystical in football.

 

On an elevated, more abstract level, I think of football as an art, a platform for expression and for people to engage with wonder, one which connects billions of people in a way no other thing really does. In that sense, it is invaluable because it is near-universal and acts as a shared language that allows so many different kinds of people to experience each other, and to share experiences in common…the game is great because it belongs to everyone, because it has spread far through the globe (pp. 158 + 160).

 

School teacher Devin Kelly seeks to make sense of the difficulties he encountered in learning how to ride a bike, when he was 32! To be honest, I find it difficult to believe that this is something that actually happened. He also says that he has always been scared of learning (p. 315). Really, can anyone believe this of a teacher? His purpose is to provide a ‘straw person’ to get over such fears, the fear of trying and failing. Well, he learnt how to ride a bike and even drive a car! And, of course, learning this new skill turned out to be transcendental.

 

You forget that you once told yourself that there was no such thing as possibility, that you were who you were. You forgot, for a small and gorgeous instant, your shame…So I am here to tell you that it works sometimes, this learning thing, this unending thing we call a life until it ends. Yes, let me tell you, it does…And for an instant, I feel beautiful. I feel reminded that I learned this new part of myself, that I didn’t know it before, that I am capable of such change (pp. 320 + 322).

 

Zack Davis is fascinated by the Detroit Mechanix, an ultimate frisbee team, which he claims has the longest losing streak in the history of professional sport. He is trying to understand how despite their continual losses, the Mechanix find a way to keep on trying, to ultimately experience success. Is it the hope that eventually kills you? His answer is linked to the myth of Sisyphus; of forever pushing a rock up the hill for it to roll down again. Davis sees struggle as part of the human condition. We go on, we keep pushing, because this is who we are. In reaching this conclusion he draws on an observation of Albert Camus.

 

One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks…the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill one’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy (p. 310)

 

You might be pleased to know that after 2,611 days the Mechanix broke their losing streak!

 

Nick Hunt provides an account of a walking tour he undertook through Europe in 2011; walking over 2,500 miles. In extolling the virtues of walking three miles an hour he segues into a broader discussion of the meaning of going away and coming home. He recounts a fable of a man in Baghdad who loses his wealth. A man appears in his dreams and tells him to go to Cairo where he will find his fortune. He travels to Cairo where he is told by a man who, also in a dream was told there was a fortune buried under a fountain in a house in Baghdad, where our original dreamer happened to live. He returns to Baghdad and sure enough finds the fortune. The issue of concern here for Davis is where is one’s treasure? Is it home, or on the road? His answer is that it is in the ‘doing’ that you will find your treasure. Life and living is about agency.

 

You cannot know home by staying away, you must go away. As a travel writer, my attention has always been on the “away” …rather than grubbing away about beneath the soil of home. The treasure has always been elsewhere, home is where I bring it back to. The fear that I had dropped my treasure on the road or jettisoned it from the plane turned out to be misplaced. It was there waiting for me – I just had to dig for it…On some subconscious level my feet are still on that road. In memories, journeys never end. This is the treasure (pp. 16 + 17).

 

In his introduction to The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2025 Hanif Abdurraqib, consistent with the observation of C. L. R. James above, refers to how sports provide a springboard for the telling of stories, offering ‘a wider window into a bigger world, inside of which, sports just happened to take place’ (p. xv). The essays in this volume, with their examination of the different ways we interact with sport, provides a splendid demonstration of this observation. The Year’s Best Sports Writing project seems to be getting better with age; bring on 2026!

 

 

To read more by Braham Dabscheck click here.

 

 

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