A sportswriter gets in deep

Before ESPN “SportsCenter” and ESPN the magazine, before endless office chatter about fantasy baseball, and the ascent of the wisecracking, barely reformed frat-boy sportscaster, there was an undisputed gold standard of sports coverage, and that gold standard was Sports Illustrated.

Gary Smith is a fortunate product of what Sports Illustrated wrought. In “Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories,” published recently by Sports Illustrated Books, readers can experience his take on tennis great Andre Agassi, soccer star Mia Hamm and the remnants of Muhammad Ali’s entourage, but also learn the saga of the Crow tribe’s basketball prowess and the cross-country dominance of Mexican migrant kids.

SI made a writer like Smith possible. During its golden age, the magazine didn’t just report on playoff games, title bouts or great rivalries -- the sports pages of the newspapers did that. And it didn’t treat sports as the raw material of snarky on-air banter, nor view it as a means to an end, that end being a talk show.

Instead, the magazine provided context and storytelling -- and, as befitted its name, superb photography (which scaled a lush pinnacle every year with the swimsuit issue). The magazine was a special experience, intimate in its scope yet sweeping in its ambition. And yet as the audience for sports has grown, the SI ethos has engendered a reaction. Many no longer want the Big Thing; many just want to be endlessly updated and forever amused.

So it’s no stretch to say that SI pioneered the thinking man’s way of considering sports, and because it entered its heyday when American New Journalism was at its peak, in the 1970s and ‘80s, the whole package was relevant, swaggering and frequently lived up to the view that sportswriting was journalism’s answer to epic poetry. Times have changed, but to a degree, SI still flies that banner.

Smith’s book explains why. It is a rich and yeasty experience, crammed with complex, layered narratives that often tell the tales of sporting lives most people probably have never heard of. In an era of endless “SportsCenter” knockoffs and edgy sports blogs such as Deadspin and popular quick-hit websites like ESPN.com’s Page 2, Smith is something of an enviable anachronism: a magazine journalist who’s on contract to write four long stories a year, pretty much on whatever he wants.

“It’s a privilege and my good fortune,” said Smith, 54, in an interview from his home in Charleston, S.C. “To be able to work on four long stories per year is incredibly rare.”

Smith, now a senor writer at SI, has been contributing to the publication for 25 years. During that time, he has won a National Magazine Award a bedazzling four times (all the victorious stories are included in the book) and seen his work anthologized in the yearly “Best American Sportswriting” 11 times.

In 2003, Ben Yagoda, writing in Slate on the occasion of Smith’s third NMA win, took the opportunity to proclaim him “not only the best sportswriter in America” but “the best magazine writer in America.” His finest efforts invariably provoke the satisfied sense that you have not just waded through many thousands of words but have been taken on a quasi-spiritual journey to the core of something significant.

Take “The Rapture of the Deep,” which is not about baseball, football, basketball or hockey, or even second-tier sports such as golf or tennis. It’s about competitive free-diving -- or, as Smith describes it, in his sneakily seductive style, “a man slipping into the ocean, about to enter a trap where he can’t breathe, speak, see or smell. . . . A man atop a 56-story building who’s heading all the way down to the cellar, then back to the roof, only the building is water, all water, and he has no scuba tank.”

It’s the story of Cuba’s Pipin Ferreras, the world’s greatest free-diver, and of Audrey Mestre, who fell in love with him and his passion for an insanely dangerous activity. She died in 2002 attempting to break the record for deepest female dive. In 2003, James Cameron bought the film rights.

There’s always a human cost in a Smith story. In fact, stories that lack one don’t interest him. “I try to identify the pivotal point,” Smith said, describing his lengthy research-and-writing process. “Because it’s critical in terms of revealing that person. I ask what a story needs. Then I render it as honestly as possible to pull the reader in and try not to come to any conclusions about these people. I’m writing a short story that just happens to be about a person who actually exists.”

He’s been living up to his billing for a while. “People who knew about him always knew he was the One,” said Terry McDonell, SI’s editor. “Working with him is as good as it’s ever been for me.”

McDonell has been at the helm of SI since 2002, but he was a Smith fan long before arriving at the magazine. He has also been hearing about the demise of long-form journalism for years.

“I find it annoying and hilarious at the same time. It’s a question I’ve been answering since I was the editor of Esquire in the early 1990s. There are four or five magazines that still do that kind of journalism. People love it as much as they ever did. Younger readers have returned to Sports Illustrated because they get to read Gary Smith.”

Smith has a reputation for bonding with his subjects -- a dying Jim Valvano, a deceitful Notre Dame football coach George O’Leary or Tiger Woods’ dad in prophetic mode -- in unique ways. “Gary gets extraordinary access,” McDonell said. “The key to it all is having your subjects as interested in you as you are in them.”

It’s possible that the kind of journalism Smith has always done will go away. Still, the themes will probably persist. He’s reporting, he said, on the “universals we all experience.” Or, as McDonell put it, “all that stuff the Greeks taught us.” Nor does Smith have any plans to bid farewell to his chosen form. But you can’t call him impractical. “I’m enjoying what I’m doing. And at some point, I’ll do something else.”

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