Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey

Overview

For some people, writing for Sports Illustrated would be considered a dream job. For some families, living in the South of France would be considered a dream life. In 2004, S.L. Price got to do both. After parlaying a job offer into a one-year assignment covering sports in Europe, Price moves his wife and three kids to a small hamlet in Provence, and then, on the eve of the Olympics' epic return to Athens, proceeds to span the continent trying to untangle the soul of world sports. He goes to Pakistan to understand the planet's most intense and bloody rivalry, spends time with Lance Armstrong as he fends off rumors of performance-enhancing drugs, charts the American surge in English soccer and basketball fever in Belgrade. Through Grand Slam tennis events, soccer matches and the bacchanal that is Europe's premiere ski race, Price traces all the cross-currents of passion and patriotism, the mutually suspicious and admiring attitudes between U.S. and Europe -- and then he manages to do more. For Far Afield is more than a sports travelogue. In detailing his family's adjustment to France, in teasing out what it's like to live in a Europe convulsed by terrorism, anti-Americanism and George Bush's war in Iraq, in tracing his development as a writer with detailed portraits of icons like Ted Williams and Michael Jordan, Price provides a vivid portrait of one man's growth in his craft, and one American's walk through a strange land in the strangest of times.

Editorial Reviews

Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 13 years and author of Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports, finds his past in the most unfamiliar places when he moves to the south of France to report on European sports for a year. Inside his coverage of every new competition in every new city lurks Price's profoundly American self-consciousness. Lambasted at every turn for Bush's war on terror, Price's American identity is formed defensively as he spars with European opponents over the war, politics and history. Luckily, Price couldn't be further removed from the ugly American stereotype. He's perceptive, open-minded and intelligent, transcribing Europe with the confident, lofty lyricism of an American sportswriter who has found his voice. His metaphors hit the mark, whether summing up the doping accusations against Lance Armstrong, eating eggs with Ted Williams, experiencing the fanaticism of the India-Pakistan cricket rivalry, exploring Europe's obsession with soccer or sitting down with prospective NBA centers from the former Eastern bloc. Price is aware that the biggest action has a way of following him wherever he goes. Indeed, his memoir is a stroll through a minefield of recent European headlines--the train bombings in Madrid, the Le Pen vote scare in France and the 2004 Athens Olympics. The personal becomes political and the political gets personal in this travel memoir, as national identities and sports collide. (Sept.)
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Author Information

Bio of S. L. Price

A Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994, Scott L. Price has written three books: Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into the Heart of Cuban Sports (1998, HarperCollins/Ecco), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and in September 2007, Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey, which The New York Times Sunday Book Review called "a gracefully written book...Price is a virtuoso at locating unconventional entries into common topics...a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese, and Pete Hamill." Esquire magazine also named Far Afield one of the five best books of 2007. His latest, Heart of the Game: Life, Death and Mercy in Minor League America, will be published by HarperCollins/Ecco in May 2009. Before moving to Sports Illustrated, Price was a columnist and feature writer for The Miami Herald. He has won many journalism prizes from the Associated Press Sports Editors and other organizations. His work has been anthologized four times in The Best American Sports Writing series and in Sports Illustrated's own collection, Fifty Years of Great Writing, as well as in Travelers' Tales: Cuba. Price lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Lyons Press

Filesize

4.62 MB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9781599211442

Awards

• ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards