A lot has been written about sports. Everyday journalists from around the world overwhelm us with content. Stats, plot lines, standings, Tiger’s latest…

Which is why, in a world of over-reporting and “tweeting it before the other guy does”, The Tickr team appreciates a decent sports story. Ones that look beyond who’s playing who and A. Rod’s latest catch (off the field, not on).

Enter Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine — a collection of the top sports stories that have been published by Harper’s over the years. Our blunt Tickr review of the book would be: “If you’re a sports fan, buy this book and put it on your bedside table”.

But we’re going to give you a bit more than that…

The Tickr presents The Top 5 Sports Stories from Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine

The growth of Tennis and the emergence of the Davis Cup went hand-in-hand in the early twentieth century. The Davis Cup brought Tennis to a global audience where rivalries were developed and traditions emerged. “This is 1938. Tennis has changed and so has the world in which we live. Thanks to press, to radio, to easy means of communication, and to widespread interest in athletics, the Davis Cup has been “sold” to the entire world.

Another season brings hope and optimism for the Chicago Cubs? Rich Cohen documents another season of disappointment for the Cubbies. “A New Yorker, my father had urged me to follow the Dodgers or the Yankees, the teams he watched as a kid. He worried that in cheering for the Cubs I would come to accept losing as the natural condition of things and so ruin my life.”

Plimpton takes us inside the American perspective at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow where tensions were high and uncertainty was strongly prevalent. “One of my friends with the track-and-field group, with which I am traveling, told me that he felt a tap on the shoulder yesterday getting off the bus. He turned to see a policeman and his heart sank abruptly into his shoes. “This is it,” he thought. The policeman bowed slightly and handed my friend a piece of paper that had dropped from his pocket. My friend was enormously relieved, of course, but afterward he told me there had been just the slightest twinge of disappointment that the official had not said, in excellent English, “Mr. Lane, will you come with us, please.”

Up until the meeting of this unlikely pair, Marianne Moore’s favorite boxer had been Floyd Patterson. With his looming fight upcoming against Ernie Terrell would the great Muhammad Ali be able to sway the poet into his corner?

Real basketball is played on the city playground surrounded with chain linked fence that protect two metal hoops 94 feet apart. “Basketball is more than a sport or diversion in the cities. It is a part, often a major part, of the fabric of life. Kids in small towns—-particularly in the Midwest—-often become superb basketball players. But they do so by developing accurate shots and precise skills; in the cities, kids simply develop “moves.” Other athletes may learn basketball, but city kids live it.”

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