Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey Book

For some people, writing for Sports Illustrated would be considered a dream job. For some families, living in the South of France would be considered a dream life. In 2004, S.L. Price got to do both. After parlaying a job offer into a one-year assignment covering sports in Europe, Price moves his wife and three kids to a small hamlet in Provence, and then, on the eve of the Olympics' epic return to Athens, proceeds to span the continent trying to untangle the soul of world sports. He goes to Pakistan to understand the planet’s most intense and bloody rivalry, spends time with Lance Armstrong as he fends off rumors of performance-enhancing drugs, charts the American surge in English soccer and basketball fever in Belgrade. Through Grand Slam tennis events, soccer matches and the bacchanal that is Europe’s premiere ski race, Price traces all the cross-currents of passion and patriotism, the mutually suspicious and admiring attitudes between U.S. and Europe -- and then he manages to do more. For Far Afield is more than a sports travelogue. In detailing his family’s adjustment to France, in teasing out what it’s like to live in a Europe convulsed by terrorism, anti-Americanism and George Bush’s war in Iraq, in tracing his development as a writer with detailed portraits of icons like Ted Williams and Michael Jordan, Price provides a vivid portrait of one man’s growth in his craft, and one American’s walk through a strange land in the strangest of times.

The New York Times - Gordon Marino

The sports reportage in this gracefully written book is strong enough to make the sometimes-dated events seem timeless. Writers who aim to fix images of athletes and games in our collective memory need to find fresh angles, just like great photographers. Price is a virtuoso at locating unconventional entries into common topics…The seasoned reporter behind this memoir is a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price's personal paragon, Pete Hamill. Adherents of this approach drop all pretense to objectivity and are loath to dismiss any detail as irrelevant. For example, in his reckoning of the 2004 Summer Olympics, Price spends paragraphs on the travails of driving in Athens; when he's in Pakistan, taking in a historic series of cricket matches with India, he prattles on about bedbugs and a broken air-conditioner. And yet it all works to capture the tension of the event and to create a coherent and absorbing composition.