Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in its conception—another homespun story about an athlete whose lack of flashy stats belies his ability to help his team win—Lewis writes with enviable acuity. His profile of Battier is a memorable portrait of the athlete as a young man. And I’d argue that Lewis, a writer who can concisely capture character, setting and mood, and order it all into a tale of suspense without sacrificing reportorial integrity, should be celebrated as a contemporary master. But no one in literary circles talks about Lewis, because his subjects have such wide popular appeal. Yes, I know that Lewis’s book Moneyball sold like eight gazillion copies. I know your step-father has three of them on his bookshelf, two of which were given to him by well-meaning work colleagues. But the book is kind of great, a crisply written narrative braided with real insight about human psychology, sports and good old American money-grubbing.
Lewis’s sensitive depiction of Battier was especially welcome after a week of stale steroids-in-baseball stories. A-Rod, rightly re-dubbed “A-Hole” by a NY Post headline, was 
everywhere. Rodriguez admitted to ESPN that, in his mid-20s, he ’roided up while playing for the Texas Rangers. So we had to spend days watching every news program known to man cue up the 2007 footage of A-Rod staring indignantly into Katie Couric’s eyes, denying all allegations of steroid use. If there was any pleasure to be had from this palaver, it came from Timothy Egan’s fine Times online blog juxtaposing A-Rod and Michael Phelps. Egan notes that Rodriguez trotted out the I was young and stupid defense, even though he was in his mid-20s and making more money than just about anyone else in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile Phelps, the Olympian man-child “robo-athlete,” had the good sense to express remorse about his gold medal bong hit . The closest A-Rod got to remorse was a few lame, angry-sounding jokes at a University of Miami ceremony celebrating a new sports facility that Rodriguez himself paid for.
Fortunately, there was one redeemingly weird story about doping last week. Cyclist Lance Armstrong lost his cool at a press conference for the Amgen Tour of California. “You’re not worth the chair you’re sitting on with a statement like that,” Armstrong said at one point to Paul Kimmage, a reporter for the Sunday Times of London. It turns out that in September 2008, Kimmage said in a radio interview that Armstrong’s return to cycling would be a “cancer” on the sport, because he suspected that Lance was using drugs to regain his form. Armstrong, a cancer survivor, understandably took exception to the remark. Still, it is unusual to witness a star athlete glowering at a member of the press, and then actually letting loose with real (if restrained) emotion. Especially after the way Rodriguez and Phelps carefully choreographed responses to their respective scandals, Armstrong’s anger felt like an antidote. And it’s a reminder of the contentious ethics involved in professional sports, which Steven Shapin wrote about memorably in the New Yorker a few years ago.
But this brief outbreak of emotion from Armstrong doesn’t come close to the excitement and edification that Michael Lewis is able to generate in his sports writing. Consider this, from the aforementioned article on Shane Battier: “Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt?”
Here, in clear, rhythmic prose, Lewis moves from Battier’s biography to a larger cultural context that takes in race, class, sports and American manhood. These three sentences, like the article as a whole, contain equal parts wisdom and momentum. What do sports tell us about the way our culture defines character? Lewis reaches for answers to such questions, and in this way shows us that sports writing, at its most worthwhile and illuminating, is literature.
