Magazine plays well in sports

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN: Sportswriting From The New Yorker. Edited by David Remnick. Random House. 492 pages. $30.

There's something almost always unsettling about an opera diva's rendition of a popular song: The beautiful voice, the technical precision rarely mask the soullessness, the touch of condescension that accompanies the performance.

For similar reasons, hard-core sports fans might cringe when The New Yorker, famous for its sophistication, comes out to play with the rest of us kids and deigns to mess about in life's sandbox. Well, relax. Though it's not at all synonymous with sports, The New Yorker has a long and noble sportswriting tradition. The magazine's staff writers past and present are famously versatile and, with rare exceptions, they bring enthusiasm and insight to games we've invented to agreeably pass time.

Arguably, at least three New Yorker staffers -- Herbert Warren Wind on golf, Roger Angell on baseball and A.J. Liebling on boxing -- have written better about their respective sports than anyone. Ben McGrath on the peculiarities of the knuckleball, Malcolm Gladwell on the dreaded sports phenomenon known as "choking," Adam Gopnik on a dying art historian teaching football to young boys, Lillian Ross on a Brooklyn-born matador, or Alva Johnston on playwright, con man and boxing promoter Wilson Mizner, are among the gems in this collection that ranges over six decades of sportswriting.

If the profiles of legends Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong compare less well, it's likely because of the additional, unflattering information we've acquired independently about each since the original publication. On the other hand, intervening years have only added to the luster of John McPhee's "A Sense of Where You Are," a brilliant capture of what in 1965 was only a collegiate basketball star, Princeton's Bill Bradley.

Big-name free agents help fill out what editor Remnick calls his "lineup." Don DeLillo, Ring Lardner, John Cheever and others take a smart turn at bat with the cleanup spot reserved for John Updike's classic piece about Ted Williams' final game.

And if football feels underrepresented, there's a variety remaining: pieces on figure skating, horse racing, snowmobiling, and ping-pong, and looks at the truly outre: marathon swimming, dog sledding and parkour. Without compromising swagger and style, The New Yorker, it turns out, plays well with others.