Wright Thompson - The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

My wife and I went to dinner last night at a supper club on Moon Lake. It was early summer, the cotton small and fragile in its rows. With the car windows rolled down, the air smelled like the river. The ruins of the casino Tennessee Williams wrote about still hovered in the shadows if you knew where and when to look. Wed come home to the Mississippi Delta to bring our new baby to visit her grandmama and to unwind for a few days. My hometown is an agricultural community named Clarksdale, at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. If you know it at all, its as the home of the Delta blues, the droning, driving 12 bars of pain and joy that sprang from the surrounding plantations. Whenever I hear that music, it takes me home. I love driving through the Delta, which is as flat as Montana is tall, especially in the last hour of daylight. The sun hangs big and low and makes the fields and collapsed shacks and faded mansions glow a brilliant gold. All of it seems anointed or ready to be burned.

We rode through the glow on the way to Moon Lake, out Friars Point Road toward U.S. Highway 1, which traces the Mississippi River. We drove past the once mighty King & Anderson plantation, broken up by inheritance and time and greed and cotton prices and estate taxes. About the only thing left of that world is the music. Every time anyone listens to the Delta blues, they hear the dreams and the cost.

Wed come to Clarksdale because when Im really tired or beaten down, theres nothing like home to put me back together again. Id been on a long run: our first baby born, trips to Japan, to Italy and India then Italy again, to Paris, London, and Manchester, plus crisscrossing the continental United States. Id been on the road for months straight if I thought about it one way or for the past 20 years if I thought about it another. My wife, Sonia, is firmly in Camp Latter. When I first left my hometown, I was determined to see the world, all of it, and thats what Ive been lucky enough to do in my job, from dark pool halls in Argentina to a forward operating base in Iraq to a civil war in Kenya. That was my dream, and it came true: Ive been nearly everywhere people play and watch games, everywhere they look for freedom with a ball in their hands or at their feet, everywhere people invest complicated, tribal ideas of home and family in sporting events played by strangers. Sometimes the individual dispatches feel like exhaust fumes from an ongoing, overarching search. A hunger has long kept me out looking for the next thing, and the thing after that. But what was that hunger about? I figured that if there was anything this preface called for, it was some sort of self-examination of how this collection came to be and what there is to be learned from reading about sports.

I wondered how to sum up stories that mean more to me than I can reasonably explain without embarrassment. As I talked about it with Sonia, she told me something Id never heard her say before. She said she had often viewed herself as a corner man in a boxing ring. Her job in between my reporting trips was to calm me down and squirt water in my mouth and fix my cuts and bruises and get me in reasonably good enough shape to go back out and fight another round. To me, the title of this bookwhich comes from a Drive-By Truckers songwas a piece of connective tissue between the people and places Ive written about. So often I crawl around in the lives of men and women who yearn for a different kind of self and future and pay a price for that yearning. But to Sonia, the title was about me.

I remember the first time I read Gary Smiths letter from the Pine Ridge Reservation, a parable about the power and limits of sports to provide an escape; and when I discovered Frank Defords profile of Bobby Knight, which was true when it ran and only got truer with the passing years; and what I understood about the importance of cutting through myths to find something real when I read Charles P. Pierces story on Tiger Woods. I learned about ambition, including my own, when I read Richard Ben Cramers masterpiece on Ted Williams, and in Gay Taleses profile of Joe DiMaggio I found a reflection on the fleeting nature of fame and greatnesswhat relief it brings those who burned themselves chasing it, and what pain it cant begin to touch. Those of us who write these kinds of sports stories, which feels like an ever-shrinking pool, are not after the symphony of a novel, or the jazz improv of a poem, but the hard, rough gut-punch of a blues riff.