Re-reading and Reconsidering the 80s classic, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter

In advance of the release of my Audible Original, How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying), I decided to return to a novel that I poured through when I was struggling to break into the business, a novel that made me think long and hard about whether it was worth it.

I read Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter back in 1987. My copy was a beautiful soft-cover paperback in the Vintage Contemporary imprint, where all smart, trenchant fiction of the time was landing. The buzziest Vintage Contemporary novel at the time was Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, the story of a a twenty-something who checked facts at the New Yorker by day and partied by night, fueled by “Colombian Marching Powder.” Bright Lights, Big City was all flash, brain candy for twenty- and thirty-somethings, and made McInerney the biggest name of the era’s literary bad-boy brat pack, those whose exploits played on Page 6 of tabs and in the pages of Vanity Fair. Predictably, that novel was a tough if not im…