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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. To end the show today, very happy to have Jane McManus back with us, and today in her very special role this holiday season as editor of this year's edition of the annual collection of the year's best sports writing. It's called The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024. Good title considering what's in the book. Some of you know Jane McManus from her work on ESPN, where she largely covered the NFL, among other things, and was a columnist for espnW, or from her various pieces in The New York Times and elsewhere.

Maybe you've been one of her sports writing students. She's a professor at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport at NYU. Maybe you've seen that she has a forthcoming book called The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports. Or maybe as her LinkedIn page reminds us, you watched Jane McManus when she skated with a suburbia roller derby under the pseudonym Lesley E. Visserate for seven years, retiring in 2014. Now, again, she's here as editor of The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024. Jane, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jane McManus: Wow. Really appreciate it. That's quite an intro, Brian. I really love that. Thank you very much. Gets to everything.

Brian Lehrer: I don't think I've ever asked you about your roller derby career. How does [unintelligible 00:01:27] get into roller derby, of all things, enough to become a professional at it? What's the basic appeal of the sport as a participant?

Jane McManus: Well, I mean, I love full contact sports. I played basketball, pickup basketball around New York City when I was growing up, and I just love full contact sports. I love the contact of sports, and kind of why I became a sports writer to begin with. When I ended up covering, there was a roller derby bout and my assignment editor was like, "Hey, you should go cover this," and I went and I was like, "This is my next thing. These are my people." [laughs] I joined. The league started in Yonkers and I joined and played for seven years.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't know you had a pseudonym in that league. Why was that, and why the name Lesley E. Visserate, if I'm even saying that right?

Jane McManus: It was Lesley Eviscerate.

Brian Lehrer: Oh.

Jane McManus: [chuckles] It was an homage to my favorite sports writer, Lesley Visser, who I'm still friends with to this day. She was a real inspiration for me getting into sports writing, and so I thought, what's tougher than eviscerating someone? Everybody at that time, everyone, this was back in 2009 was when I joined the league, and everybody had a pseudonym. My best friend on the team was Rita Wayward, and I played with Jerry Flinger and Charlotte Bronte and all of these other really great people with pseudonyms.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, did you just, in your first answer, say that basketball is a contact sport? I thought basketball is a non-contact sport and if you touch the other players, it's a foul.

Jane McManus: Yes, I mean, I think that's probably true at some levels, but if you're playing pickup, it's pretty much a contact sport, because there aren't referees calling fouls. You call your own fouls. If you call your own foul, that's not considered super sporting unless you get really fouled pretty hard. I think there's a lot of contact in basketball, and that got me used to taking that kind of contact, giving that kind of contact, creating your own space, creating gaps so that people can run.

That's something that happens in roller derby too, and in football, when I covered football. Creating gapping, gap development, using leverage, that kind of thing. I mean, I think those kinds of things are all similarities in a lot of the sports that I've interacted with.

Brian Lehrer: All right, The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024. I see you posted on your substack that you sifted through hundreds of stories, including from many young writers who submitted their best pieces hoping to be seen. I guess it's a lot of work editing one of these best writing of the year anthologies. You have to read a ton of stuff and make some hard calls. How did you go about it?

Jane McManus: Yes. Well, luckily, a colleague of mine, Richard Deitsch, had done it the year before and he had me on his advisory committee, so I had an advisory committee of my own and Richard was part of that. J. A. Adande, Sandy Padwe, Kavitha Davidson, or some other people I consulted. I also had just people who sent me lists of some of the best stuff that they read over the course of the year. I read it all. Triumph, which put out the year's best sports writing, they have a Gmail address that anybody can send a story to.

I can remember probably as a young writer sending some of my best stuff out just to get it read by somebody, maybe get feedback, but certainly some things I felt really strongly about that I thought I'd done a good job on, my best work. I wanted that to be read. I wanted that to be seen. It doesn't always rise to the level of a book like this, but I think that's part of the way that-- every industry has this where you want to elevate the best of what you see around you, the best examples of the genre, that kind of thing, and I think people want to engage with it.

It's meaningful. People who've been in this book, they remember it. It's a career highlight. You want your friends, if you feel like they've written something really strong, your colleagues, to get recognition for their work. Yes, that's a big part of it. That's part of the burden, really, because you don't want something to slip between the cracks. There's one of these a year, and you want the people who've earned a spot there to get that recognition.

Brian Lehrer: One piece that you highlight in the intro to the book is Sally Jenkins' column for The Washington Post about the tennis greats Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. I understand you're being generous to offer to read a passage from that article. Do you want to set it up? I was thinking, gee, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, those are tennis stars from a past generation. Why were they a Sally Jenkins topic in 2024?

Jane McManus: That's such a great question, Brian. You're such a great interviewer, [chuckles] and it's because you ask these questions that are like this. Most newspapers, I think, in this day and age, or sports outlets, given the shrinking industry, you'd be hard pressed to find a lot of editors who would say, "Yes, two women in their late 60s, let's absolutely write a sports story about them." That's the power of Sally Jenkins, I think, as a writer. She's someone who's got so much respect.

She goes back a generation or two with both of these women, and so it really is, I feel like, the three of these women in dialogue with one another at this point, and her ability to get inside and under their skin and to really understand who they are, that comes from decades of reporting and writing around tennis, around sports, and around particularly Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

When Sally Jenkins takes this piece to her editors at The Washington Post, who still care about this kind of writing, about long form, and are able to produce it at a high level and have the resources that it takes to send somebody like Sally to report this for a few months. They say yes to that, and I don't know that everybody would say yes to that, but they saw this as a compelling story. The great thing about this piece is that it led The Washington Post website the day that it came out. I think that shows you the power of good writing.

Brian Lehrer: You have a little excerpt.

Jane McManus: I do, I do. Just a paragraph to give your readers a taste of it. "They have known each other for 50 years now, outlasting most marriages. 'Aside from blood kin,' Navratilova points out, 'I've known Chris longer than anybody else in my life, and so it is for her.' Lately, they've never been closer, a fact they refuse to cheapen with sentimentality. 'It's been up and down,' the friendship, Evert says. At the ages of 68 and 66, respectively, Evert and Navratilova found themselves more entwined than ever by an unwelcome factor.

You want to meet an opponent who draws you nearer in mutual understanding? Try having cancer at the same time. It was like, "Are you kidding me?" Everett says.' That gives you a sense of the writing and of the story. It's incredible.

Brian Lehrer: And the humanity of the players, not just who won and who lost and stuff like that.

Jane McManus: Right, and that's what great sports writing is. It's about the storytelling. The reason that we love sports writing, I think, and why it's been such an enduring genre is because it is a way for you to get inside somebody's head, to understand somebody. You see people over and over again. You get to know them over decades, over a lifetime. You follow them. Pete Rose, after he's done playing, and his battle with baseball that lasted up until his last breath. These are the kinds of things, these are compelling stories that I think as sports fans, you feel like you know somebody a little bit more.

You see somebody on the pitch or on the court at the height of their emotional happiness, in the moment of victory or in a moment of defeat, and it's very revealing. Those moments are very revealing, and we don't get to see people outside of our immediate family experiencing those things for the most part. I think there's something very intimate about sports and about sports writing and sports storytelling done well.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we have just a few minutes for a phone call or two. If anybody wants to chime in on what you look for in a piece of sports writing, other than to find out the score of last night's game or who's going to sign Juan Soto, or if you have a question for Jane McManus, editor of this year's The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Let me ask you for a minute, because I told listeners I would, about the tough stuff relating to our previous segment, the news that the golf leagues, LPGA and the USGA, made yesterday.

They're requiring any transgender women wanting to compete on those tours that they have had medical interventions before puberty because male puberty confers too much of a competitive advantage. The leagues say they're trying to balance competitive fairness and respect for people's identity. Can you give us any insight into how they might have gone about determining where that balance lies?

Jane McManus: Yes, this is an interesting topic for me in particular, and since you brought up my roller derby career, I will mention that in 2010, we had the first inclusive transgender policy in women's sports. I played against trans players at the highest levels of roller derby at that time, and it was fine. I mean, it's a team sport, so it's a little bit different, but it's full contact. I think that there's a lot of hand wringing at the moment and particularly with yesterday about what fair competition is, and I think it's different in an individual sport.

When golf makes the decision to exclude at the elite levels, but they've also made the decision to include at the less competitive levels, which I think is important. The conversation is often around the highest level of competition, but for me personally, sports like roller derby, AYSO soccer, those are the levels when you're talking about youth and recreation sports where you're going to actually encounter transgender players. I think those are the levels where we really have to say we want to include people when we can, because there isn't a danger to girls and women who play sports with boys and men.

I think that inclusive play is actually a place where we can get to understand each other and respect each other as athletes and competitors.

Brian Lehrer: You think that the LPGA did not get this right, that they were too excluding? Yes?

Jane McManus: I'm not sure. It's hard for me to judge because I wasn't part of the process that they went through, and I think they know their membership and what they need at that elite level. As I say, I err on the tendency of inclusion when possible, but they may have found that the elite level of competition wasn't a place where they felt comfortable doing that for whatever reason.

Brian Lehrer: I guess what parents or anybody might be thinking is, well, gee, if you get somebody to use the basketball context with a LeBron James or Shaquille O'Neill kind of body and no woman has that, then whether or not it's a physical danger to anybody, it's going to be unfair competition. What's an answer to that?

Jane McManus: Well, I think we have to ask why we're sorting people by gender when it comes to sports when you could easily do it by skill level. By that, you look at what's happening, say, for example, Little League Baseball or something like that, you can sort by skill so that you put the best players, regardless of gender, on a certain team. For me, anyway, I'm thinking, how do we include people? How could we reimagine some of these systems?

Having most boys play against LeBron James is not fair either, but having the conversation always be around gender and sorting people first based on gender and second based on skill, as opposed to first based on skill and second gender, I mean, I just worry about small towns where you have teams without enough girls to field-- say, a wrestling team where girls compete on the wrestling team and it's fine. I just worry that this kind of hysteria around excluding trans athletes then means that eventually girls can't play on these boys teams in places where there aren't enough teams to field both.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Jim in Norwalk has a sports writing question. Jim, you're on WNYC with Jane McManus. Hi.

Jim: Hi. I just wanted to make a comment. I used to love reading the sports pages in The New York Times, and ever since they bought The Athletic, it's just so disappointing to me. I'm a person who'd rather read about sports. I don't have the time to watch these long games that typically get played. Now when I go to The Athletic, it's like you have to be a member of this boys club in order to even understand what they're talking about. I just wondered if you had any comments or thoughts about that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I'll mention that Jane writes in the intro to this anthology that she edited, The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024, about the decline of the sports journalism business, and I think you mentioned explicitly The Times closing their unionized sports department and acquiring the non-unionized Athletic, right?

Jane McManus: I do, I do. A lot of the writers, thinking about John Branch and Jenny Vrentas and Juliette Macur, some of those writers who've done such quality work there are still writing at The Times. They're just not technically in the sports section, but you can still read. John Branch did an amazing piece last year which came very close to making this, but it was so visually based. He wrote a wonderful piece on a climbing expedition in the 1980s that ended up going awry and a canister of film that was found in the snow 20 years later and they developed the film.

It's this unraveling of the story of the mountain climbing expedition using this newly uncovered film. It's brilliant. I agree with you, some of that storytelling is incredible and you don't find it in the same way anymore. It makes something like this more precious because there are fewer outlets for it. The Times is still producing very quality work, but I mean, I tend to agree with you that that kind of expansive long form is just not done in the same volume and the insider talk takes over then when you aren't getting the same kind of storytelling.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give us literally a 20-second blurb about one of the other pieces that you included in best sports writing, Emily Sohn's story that I know you're interested in about Virginia Kraft, the first woman who was a full-time sports writer for Sports Illustrated.

Jane McManus: I love this story. It was in Long Lead, which is a long form devoted outlet. Emily Sohn looks at the history of this woman, Virginia Kraft, who she worked at Sports Illustrated. She was the first full-time writer for Sports Illustrated back in the 1950s and '60s, so the glory days of that old world of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac in that old tradition of sports writing. She was the big game beat writer, which means that she was tracking rhinoceroses and jaguars all over the world.

Brian Lehrer: Of all things,-

Jane McManus: I know.

Brian Lehrer: - covering big game. Well, we've gone from roller derby to big game hunting and more with Jane McManus here as editor of The Year's Best Sports Writing 2024. She also has the forthcoming book The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women's Sports. Please come back when the book comes out, Jane.

Jane McManus: Appreciate it, Brian. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for Alison.

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