Editor's Note: Senior editors at Sports Illustrated gave nationally-acclaimed writer S.L. Price the dream assignment: to set up a base in the South of France with his wife and family and travel the world to cover people, places and events few Americans could ever know. The result is Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey – a moving story of growth and family and games people play world-wide. Think A Year in Provence in sweats with a bit more grit. Equal parts travelogue and memoir, Far Afield is an extraordinary tale of a writer's year discovering how games are played – and life is lived – an ocean away. Price immerses himself in the nuclear-fueled cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan. He argues about politics with Olympic athletes in Greece, descends upon Austria's beer-drenched version of the Super Bowl and Belgrade's hoop dreams, and explores the foreign terrain of soccer madness from Marseille to Manchester. But along the way, Price also details the strange, manic pace of the sports writing life and traces the expatriate's bumpy, entrancing path through a land that both reviles and reveres all things American. Along the way he even recounts an afternoon spent with the late baseball hall of fame icon Ted Williams.  Far Afield is A Year in Provence in sweats with a bit more grit. Scott Price has been a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994. Previously he worked as an award-winning columnist and feature writer for The Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee. He has covered six Olympic Games, two World Cups, and written about sports in Liberia, Colombia and Japan. His work has been selected three times for the annual series, "Best American Sports Writing." He is also the author of Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey Into The Heart of Cuban Sports. Excerpted with permission from the publisher from
Far Afield by S. L. Price
978-1-59921-144-2 • $24.95 • 256 pages
The Lyons Press – an imprint of Globe Pequot Press Giants lived here once. It was the kind of town, thirty years gone, that made big men out of little ones. It was geared for great deeds then, as it is geared for small deeds now. In Vachel Lindsay's day, in Carl Sandburg's day, in the silver-colored yesterday, in Darrow's and Masters' and Edna Millay's day, writers and working stiffs alike told policemen where to go, the White Sox won the pennant with a team batting average of .228 and the town was full of light. – Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make Excerpted from Chapter One The mystery box opened, and there they sat—Algren, David Mamet, Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Upton Sinclair, Mike Royko, Ring Lardner—the whole loud, unwieldy school of Chicago writers, one dozen books packed together and then tossed by the 1,500-mile ride into a jumble of accusation, a nifty dare: So what are you going to do? On top lay a note from the editor of the Chicago Tribune. "Chicago has always been a city of great stories," she wrote. "I'd like to read some of yours." Well. It was the winter of 2002, and I had been chewing over a job offer from the Trib for weeks, a great one: Write a column in America's best sports town, for one of the few ambitious newspapers left, with an old friend as boss. The courtship had followed the usual steps—a phone call, a flight, a we-love-you interview, a letter with salary and perks, and an ironclad signature. Most important, I had been handed that rarest of career gifts: leverage. Writing for newspapers or magazines isn't like other jobs; nothing you do translates easily to the bottom line. The talent traffic in air—opinions, critiques, quotes, ideas, information. Judgments are subjective; no one really knows who's any good, and when another publication comes sniffing, your bosses regard it as much a validation as a threat. Coveted from the outside, you become more coveted inside. It's rare. It's nice. But the leverage works only when wielded with conviction; you must be willing to quit. I'd had a good decade at Sports Illustrated, with a promise of more to come. The managing editor, Terry McDonell, said he'd exceed any salary offer: Leaving, on the most obvious level, made little sense. But my friend at the Tribune, an assistant managing editor now, had been a wily boss long ago in California, smart enough, week-in and week-out, to manipulate my grim and overbearing ambition. "I just want to be great," I would say back when we worked together, as if I really had a choice in the matter. He knew: Nothing would lure me better than arrogance. So the box of books opened, and Bellow and Mamet and Lardner glanced up from their typewriters and said, Greatness? You've got to go through us first. For weeks, I left it squatting in the middle of my office floor like a provocation, and after a time I swear I almost could hear the city—Jews and blacks, salesmen and hacks, couples juiced by passionate loathing, the cold and the corruption, the wind, idiocy, regret, baseball, riding the El, the Dan Ryan—rising out of it in a constant murmur of punch-in-the-face prose. For weeks, I'd trip over the box on my way to my desk, see it when I spoke on the phone, and the voices in the box kept chattering away. I finally shoved them on a shelf so they'd shut up already.
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