The Best American Sports Writing 2014 Read Free

contributions are considered are advised to provide a complimentary subscription to the address listed below. Those that already do so should extend the subscription for another year.
    All submissions must be made by U.S. mail—weather conditions in midwinter here at
BASW
headquarters often keep me from receiving UPS or FedEx submissions. Electronic submissions by any means, whether email or Twitter or URLs, and pdfs or other electronic documents are not acceptable. Only some form of hard copy, please. The February 1 deadline is real, and work received after that date may not be considered.
    Please submit either an original or a clear paper copy of each story, including publication name, author, and the date the story appeared, to:
    Â 
Glenn Stout
PO Box 549
Alburgh, VT 05440
    Â 
All submissions from me to the guest editor are made blindly, not identified by source or author.
Those with questions or comments may contact me at [email protected] . Copies of previous editions of this book can be ordered through most bookstores or online book dealers. An index of stories that have appeared in this series can be found at my website, glennstout.net , as can full instructions on how to submit a story. For updated information, readers and writers are also encouraged to join the
Best American Sports Writing
group on Facebook or to follow me on Twitter @GlennStout .
Thanks to guest editor Christopher McDougall for his attentiveness, to Michael Everett, Joel Reese, Wright Thompson, and Jon Gold for sharing their
BASW
stories with me, and to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for supporting this book. My thanks also go to Siobhan and Saorla for stumbling over the occasional carton of submissions and not complaining too much. And to the writers collected within, I hope this book helps you find more stories.
G LENN S TOUT
Alburgh, Vermont

Introduction
    D EATH-ROW CELLS have better natural light than the Rite Aid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where you can only glimpse the sky through the sad slit of a window above the checkout counter. That’s where I was gazing one afternoon when two bodies suddenly sailed past.
    These guys had to be six feet in the air, flying by one after the other like they’d been slung out of a catapult. Moments later they reappeared outside the glass doors, this time swinging through the railings of the handicapped ramp. By the time I got to the cash register, I’d watched them hurdle, vault, tightrope-walk, and otherwise wring a crazy amount of movement out of those blue bars. I hurried outside to catch them, but they weren’t leaving any time soon. “You start practicing parkour,” one told me, “and whole nights disappear.”
    Technically, he was talking about
l
’art du deplacement
, more universally known by the funkified version of its other name,
parcours
—French for “obstacle course.” Parkour was born in the late 1980s, when a band of mixed-race kids living on the outskirts of Paris got tired of being roughed up by bullies. Together, they created their own “training method for warriors,” as cofounder David Belle would explain. The original parkour tribe didn’t mind mentoring other true believers who were willing to submit to their punishing tutorials, but otherwise they had just about zero interest in sharing their skill with the rest of the world. They detested the idea of competition and produced no training videos or instruction books. Until very recently, you had only two choices if you wanted to learn parkour: go to France or try your luck with YouTube.
    Not surprisingly, the two guys I met in the Rite Aid parking lot got their start on the YouTube route. They studied videos of other self-taught parkour disciples and broke down lightning-quick sequences, frame by frame, into individual moves. Like the original parkour crew, they were using their own bodies to discover the most animal-efficient way to fly over, around, and under