famous essays about sports

Essays About Sports: Top 5 Examples and 9 Prompts

Almost nothing compares to the thrill of sports; discover our guide with helpful tips for writing essays about sports through essay examples and prompts. 

Most people would agree on the importance of sports for a well-balanced life. Sports provides us with a multitude of benefits, both physically and mentally. But more than this, sports provide people with fun, even in the darkest times. The thrills of sports games and competitions are almost unmatched in the joy it brings others. 

It is important to keep in mind several risks of playing sports. First, the competitive mindset may consume you, as some of the best books about rugby show, and you are susceptible to various injuries, depending on the sport. However, a healthy love of sports often does not involve these risks.

5 Examples of Essays About Sports

1. importance and benefits of sports by melih sozdinler, 2. the importance of sports in empowering women by jo ousterhout, 3. the fastest growing sport in the world by sean monaghan.

• 4.  Extreme Sports by Archie Simmons
• 5. ​​The Mental Health Awakening Has Reached the Sports World  — Now What? by Maggie Ryan

1. My Favorite Sport

2. physical benefits of sports, 3. psychological and mental benefits of sports, 4. opinions on sports, 5. comparing and contrasting sports, 6. an unconventional sport, 7. an extreme sport, 8. values needed for sports, 9. sports in the modern world.

“We can conclude that there are several advantages and benefits of sports. First, sports are required by people to be fit, smart, and good looking. Second, sports are entertaining due to many facts. Third, sports are the huge market for countries’ economies. In my opinion, despite sports’ advantages, many people can’t believe that sports are useful and beneficial. I hope that in the future these people will tend to be more optimistically to sports since they are the necessity of our lives.”

Sozdinler writes about why people should play sports, elaborating on several benefits of sports. First, sports help improve coordination, cognition, circulation, and physique. Second, they provide us with entertainment and relief from the stresses of life. Finally, sports competitions are economically beneficial, allowing countries to expose their people and goods to foreigners. 

“Women who participate in sports are more likely to do better in school, attend college and make higher wages. In a survey of 401 female executives, 82 percent reported playing organized sports while growing up. Hillary understands the role sports can play in empowering women. As she has said, “Sports can make you stronger, tougher, more confident, more resilient, and those qualities can stay with you long after you finish the race or the final buzzer sounds.”

In this essay, Ousterhout discusses a speech by Hillary Clinton in which she stressed the importance of empowering women through sports. Clinton recognizes women’s talent in all fields, sports included, and Ousterhout, citing research, discusses how sports can help women succeed academically and otherwise. Finally, she uses this as a basis to support Clinton’s 2016 campaign for the presidency of the United States. 

“From a game played by the Navajo tribe, to a game broadcasted to millions of people each weekend. Having a sport that is fast paced and filled with incredible skill, lacrosse is bound to see even more growth in the future. The PLL, college lacrosse, and social media have all impacted lacrosse and all sports forever, proving that lacrosse is the fastest growing sport in the world.”

Monaghan writes about lacrosse and how it is becoming more popular. He briefly describes its history, dating back to the Navajo tribe. It started being played as an organized sport in the 1900s and has only grown in popularity. Monaghan believes that Lacrosse is the fastest-growing sport in the world, and its popularity is much-deserved. Check out these essays about badminton.

4.   Extreme Sports by Archie Simmons

“Various news stories, movies, and other sources in the media help spread the impression of the risks and dangers of the sports. Although the public hears mostly about all the negative effects of extreme sports, there are a variety of ways to decrease one’s risk of injuries through proper precautions and practice. In saying that, there are also many benefits to extreme sports as seen in Bode Miller’s memoir, as well as interviews with other extreme sport athletes.”

Simmons gives a brief introduction to the world of extreme sports in his essay. Extreme sports require specialized gear and much preparation and has an increased risk of injury. Simmons writes that athletes continue to participate in extreme sports because they know the risks and prepare to avoid them. He cites a memoir by Bode Miller, explaining his methods and training to ski quickly and carefully. 

5. ​​ The Mental Health Awakening Has Reached the Sports World  — Now What? by Maggie Ryan

“Sports can provide community, boost physical and mental health, foster self-confidence, and serve as an escape. Sports can also be the opposite of all those things: isolating, physically and mentally debilitating, or something that athletes can come to dread. The dividing line between the two, Post says, lies in the tools and preventative care that athletes have at their disposal.”

Ryan writes about the effects of competitive sports on athletes’ mental health. Sometimes athletes are pressured into making sports the center of their lives, affecting their mental health and social life to their detriment. Ryan cites several athletes who have been open about their struggles, including Simone Biles and Jasmine Blocker. The industry must work on this issue and break the stigma around mental health. 

9 Prompts for Essays About Sports

All sports enthusiasts follow one particular sport. Whether you play it or not, choose your favorite sport and briefly describe how it is played. Also, explain why it is your favorite; this should be based entirely on your opinion. 

Participating in a sport can make you stronger and healthier. In your essay, write about a few of the many physical benefits playing sports can have. This can include, muscle strengthening, cardio workout, increased stamina, and good mental health. Give examples of specific sports and the body parts they can help you strengthen, such as football increasing leg strength and increasing stamina.

Playing sports can also clear your mind and make you healthier mentally. Discuss how sports can improve your cognition and mental health, such as certain skills, values, and emotions they can promote. Ensure your argument is well-supported and provide research and statistics for a convincing essay.

In your essay, write about your stance on playing sports, specifically whether you like playing them or not. Discuss the pros and cons of playing sports, and include anecdotes of the different kinds of sports you have tried out. Conclude your essay by deciding whether you are a fan of playing sports or not.

This essay topic is simple and straightforward. Choose any two sports and give a short description of each. Organize your essay according to their similarities and differences in gameplay, physical activity required, and training. Be sure to choose sports that are not too different, and make sure they have some similarities. For example, you could compare and contrast American football with Rugby, discuss the similarities and differences for an exciting piece of writing.

Some sports are deemed “unconventional” due to a lack of physical activity or belittlement for their more art-centric practices. These include chess, thumb wrestling, and dance. Choose a more niche sport and write about its mechanics and popularity in the world today. 

Many sports force athletes to risk their lives, such as bungee jumping and paragliding. In your essay, you can write about one of these “extreme sports” and what they entail. Focus on your chosen sport’s health risks and dangers and perhaps explain why people still participate despite the risk. 

To excel in sports, one needs to have values such as commitment, courage, and teamwork. Discuss one or more of these skills and values, giving their definition and usage in sports. Be as detailed as possible for an engaging, well-supported essay.

Like everything else in the 21st century, the sports landscape is changing drastically due to the rise of esports and other developments. Research on the state of sports and sports competitions in the modern world. To you, is this a good thing? Briefly explain your stance in the essay as well. 

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining what is persuasive writing .

If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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How to Write a Non-Cliche College Essay About Sports + Examples

What’s covered:, what makes a sports essay cliche.

• How To Make Your Sports Essay Unique

Great Examples of College Essays About Sports

Where to get your college essay edited for free, or by an expert.

You’ve been brainstorming essay topics for your college applications, and you think you’ve finally found the right one: an extended metaphor likening your experience on the field with overcoming personal struggles. The problem: many other students have this same thought. 

The purpose of a college essay is to make yourself stand out as a unique individual, but when students write about sports, they often blend in. Because of that, students are usually advised to pick a different topic.

That being said, it is possible to write a non-cliche college essay about sports if you put in a little extra effort. Read along to learn how to make your sports essay different from all the other sports essays.

Sports essays are cliche when they follow a standard trajectory. Some of these trajectories include writing a story about:

• An agonizing defeat
• Forging bonds with teammates
• Overcoming adversity
• Overcoming an injury
• Refusing to quit
• Victory during a big game

Because sports essays have very similar themes and “lessons learned,” it can be difficult to make your story stand out. These trajectories also often focus too much on the sport or storyline, and not enough on the writer’s reflections and personality.

As you write your essay, try to think about what your experience says about you rather than what you learned from your experience. You are more than just one lesson you learned!

(Keep in mind that the sports essay is not the only college essay cliche. Learn about other essay cliches and how to fix them in our complete guide).

How to Make Your Sports Essay Unique

1. focus on a specific moment or reflection..

The college essay is a way for students to humanize themselves to admissions officers. You do not feel human if you are describing yourself as just another player on the field!

One important way to make your essay about you (not just about sports) is by focusing on a specific moment in time and inviting the reader to join you in that moment. Explain to the reader what it would be like to be sitting in that locker room as you questioned the values of the other players on your team. Ask your reader to sit with you on the cot in the trainer’s room as your identity was stripped away from you when they said “your body can’t take this anymore.” Bring your reader to the dinner table and involve them in your family’s conversation about how sports were affecting your mental health and your treatment of those around you.

Intense descriptions of a specific experience will evoke emotions in your reader and allow them to connect with you and feel for you.

When in doubt, avoid anything that can be covered by ESPN. On ESPN, we see the games, we see the benches, we even see the locker rooms and training rooms. Take your reader somewhere different and show them something unique.

2. Use sports to point out broader themes in your life.

The main risk when writing about sports is neglecting to write about yourself. Before you get started, think about the main values that you want to express in your sports essay. Sports are simply your avenue for telling the reader what makes you unique. 

As a test, imagine if you were a pianist. Would you be able to talk about these same values? What if you were a writer? Or a chemist? Articulating your values is the end, and sports should simply be your means.

Some values that you might want to focus on:

• Autonomy (you want to be able to set your mind to anything and achieve it on your own)
• Growth (you seek improvement constantly)
• Curiosity (you are willing to try anything once)
• Vulnerability (you aren’t afraid to fail, as long as you give it your all)
• Community (you value the feedback of others and need camaraderie to succeed)
• Craft (you think that with deliberate care, anything can be perfected)
• Responsibility (you believe that you owe something to those around you and perhaps they also owe something to you)

You can use the ESPN check again to make sure that you are using sports as an avenue to show your depth.

Things ESPN covers: how a player reacts to defeat, how injuries affect a player’s gameplay/attitude, how players who don’t normally work well together are working together on their new team.

Things ESPN doesn’t cover: the conversation that a player had with their mother about fear of death before going into a big surgery (value: family and connection), the ways that the intense pressure to succeed consumed a player to the point they couldn’t be there for the people in their life (value: supporting others and community), the body image issues that weigh on a player’s mind when playing their sport and how they overcame those (value: health and growth).

3. Turn a cliche storyline on its head.

There’s no getting around the fact that sports essays are often cliche. But there is a way to confront the cliche head-on. For example, lots of people write essays about the lessons they learned from an injury, victory, and so on, but fewer students explain how they are embracing those lessons. 

Perhaps you learned that competition is overwhelming for you and you prefer teamwork, so you switched from playing basketball to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe, when your softball career ended abruptly, you had to find a new identity and that’s when you became obsessed with your flower garden and decided to pursue botany. Or maybe, you have stuck with football through it all, but your junior-year mental health struggle showed you that football should be fun and you have since started a nonprofit for local children to healthily engage with sports.

If your story itself is more cliche, try bringing readers to the present moment with you and show why the cliche matters and what it did for you. This requires a fair amount of creativity. Ensure you’re not parroting a frequently used topic by really thinking deeply to find your own unique spin.

Night had robbed the academy of its daytime colors, yet there was comfort in the dim lights that cast shadows of our advances against the bare studio walls. Silhouettes of roundhouse kicks, spin crescent kicks, uppercuts and the occasional butterfly kick danced while we sparred. She approached me, eyes narrowed with the trace of a smirk challenging me. “Ready spar!” Her arm began an upward trajectory targeting my shoulder, a common first move. I sidestepped — only to almost collide with another flying fist. Pivoting my right foot, I snapped my left leg, aiming my heel at her midsection. The center judge raised one finger. 

There was no time to celebrate, not in the traditional sense at least. Master Pollard gave a brief command greeted with a unanimous “Yes, sir” and the thud of 20 hands dropping-down-and-giving-him-30, while the “winners” celebrated their victory with laps as usual. 

Three years ago, seven-thirty in the evening meant I was a warrior. It meant standing up straighter, pushing a little harder, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am”, celebrating birthdays by breaking boards, never pointing your toes, and familiarity. Three years later, seven-thirty in the morning meant I was nervous. 

The room is uncomfortably large. The sprung floor soaks up the checkerboard of sunlight piercing through the colonial windows. The mirrored walls further illuminate the studio and I feel the light scrutinizing my sorry attempts at a pas de bourrée, while capturing the organic fluidity of the dancers around me. “Chassé en croix, grand battement, pique, pirouette.” I follow the graceful limbs of the woman in front of me, her legs floating ribbons, as she executes what seems to be a perfect ronds de jambes. Each movement remains a negotiation. With admirable patience, Ms. Tan casts me a sympathetic glance.   

There is no time to wallow in the misery that is my right foot. Taekwondo calls for dorsiflexion; pointed toes are synonymous with broken toes. My thoughts drag me into a flashback of the usual response to this painful mistake: “You might as well grab a tutu and head to the ballet studio next door.” Well, here I am Master Pollard, unfortunately still following your orders to never point my toes, but no longer feeling the satisfaction that comes with being a third degree black belt with 5 years of experience quite literally under her belt. It’s like being a white belt again — just in a leotard and ballet slippers. 

But the appetite for new beginnings that brought me here doesn’t falter. It is only reinforced by the classical rendition of “Dancing Queen” that floods the room and the ghost of familiarity that reassures me that this new beginning does not and will not erase the past. After years spent at the top, it’s hard to start over. But surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become. In Taekwondo, we started each class reciting the tenets: honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet. 

The thing about change is that it eventually stops making things so different. After nine different schools, four different countries, three different continents, fluency in Tamil, Norwegian, and English, there are more blurred lines than there are clear fragments. My life has not been a tactfully executed, gold medal-worthy Taekwondo form with each movement defined, nor has it been a series of frappés performed by a prima ballerina with each extension identical and precise, but thankfully it has been like the dynamics of a spinning back kick, fluid, and like my chances of landing a pirouette, unpredictable. 

Why it works:

What’s especially powerful about this essay is that the author uses detailed imagery to convey a picture of what they’re experiencing, so much so that the reader is along for the ride. This works as a sports essay not only because of the language and sensory details, but also because the writer focuses on a specific moment in time, while at the same time exploring why Taekwondo is such an important part of their life.

After the emotional image is created, the student finishes their essay with valuable reflection. With the reflection, they show admissions officers that they are mature and self-aware. Self-awareness comes through with statements like “surrendering what you are only leads you to what you may become” and maturity can be seen through the student’s discussion of values “honor, courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, courage, humility, and knowledge, and I have never felt that I embodied those traits more so than when I started ballet.” These are the kinds of comments that should find their way into a sports essay!

“Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one. 

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we compete with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

In the beginning, you might think this is another cliche sports essay about overcoming adversity. But instead, it becomes a unique statement and coming-of-age tale that reads as a suspenseful narrative. 

The author connects their experience with martial arts to larger themes in their life but manages to do so without riffing off of tried-and-true themes. Through statements like “I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was” we learn about the students values and their desire to be there for those who depend on them. 

The student also brings it full circle, demonstrating their true transformation. By using the “Same, but Different” ending technique , the student places themself in the same environment that we saw in the intro, but experiences it differently due to their actions throughout the narrative. This is very compelling!

“1…2…3…4 pirouettes! New record!” My friends cheered as I landed my turns. Pleased with my progress, I gazed down at my worn-out pointe shoes. The sweltering blisters, numbing ice-baths, and draining late-night practices did not seem so bad after all. Next goal: five turns.

For as long as I can remember, ballet, in all its finesse and glamor, had kept me driven day to day. As a child, the lithe ballerinas, donning ethereal costumes as they floated across the stage, were my motivation. While others admired Messi and Adele, I idolized Carlos Acosta, principal dancer of the Royal Ballet. 

As I devoted more time and energy towards my craft, I became obsessed with improving my technique. I would stretch for hours after class, forcing my leg one inch higher in an effort to mirror the Dance Magazine cover girls. I injured my feet and ruined pair after pair of pointe shoes, turning on wood, cement, and even grass to improve my balance as I spun. At competitions, the dancers with the 180-degree leg extensions, endless turns, and soaring leaps—the ones who received “Bravos!” from the roaring audience—further pushed me to refine my skills and perfect my form. I believed that, with enough determination, I would one day attain their level of perfection. Reaching the quadruple-pirouette milestone only intensified my desire to accomplish even more. 

My efforts seemed to have come to fruition two summers ago when I was accepted to dance with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet at their renowned New York City summer intensive. I walked into my first session eager to learn from distinguished ballet masters and worldly dancers, already anticipating my improvement. Yet, as I danced alongside the accomplished ballerinas, I felt out of place. Despite their clean technique and professional training, they did not aim for glorious leg extensions or prodigious leaps. When they performed their turn combinations, most of them only executed two turns as I attempted four. 

“Dancers, double-pirouettes only.” 

Taken aback and confused, I wondered why our teacher expected so little from us. The other ballerinas seemed content, gracing the studio with their simple movements. 

As I grew closer with my Moscow roommates, I gradually learned that their training emphasized the history of the art form instead of stylistic tricks. Rather than show off their physical ability, their performances aimed to convey a story, one that embodied the rich culture of ballet and captured both the legacy of the dancers before them and their own artistry. As I observed my friends more intently in repertoire class, I felt the pain of the grief-stricken white swan from Swan Lake, the sass of the flirtatious Kitri from Don Quijote, and I gradually saw what I had overlooked before. My definition of talent had been molded by crowd-pleasing elements—whirring pirouettes, gravity-defying leaps, and mind-blowing leg extensions. This mindset slowly stripped me from the roots of my passion and my personal connection with ballet. 

With the Bolshoi, I learned to step back and explore the meaning behind each step and the people behind the scenes. Ballet carries history in its movements, from the societal values of the era to each choreographer’s unique flair. As I uncovered the messages behind each pirouette, kick, and jump, my appreciation for ballet grew beyond my obsession with raw athleticism and developed into a love for the art form’s emotive abilities in bridging the dancers with the audience. My journey as an artist has allowed me to see how technical execution is only the means to a greater understanding between dancer and spectator, between storyteller and listener. The elegance and complexity of ballet does not revolve around astonishing stunts but rather the evocative strength and artistry manifested in the dancer, in me. It is the combination of sentiments, history, tradition, and passion that has allowed ballet and its lessons of human connection to become my lifestyle both on and off stage.

This essay is about lessons. While the author is a dancer, this narrative isn’t really about ballet, per se — it’s about the author’s personal growth. It is purposefully reflective as the student shows a nice character arc that begins with an eager young ballerina and ends with a reflection on their past. The primary strength of this essay is the honesty and authenticity that the student approaches it with.

In the end, the student turns a cliche on its head as they embrace the idea of overcoming adversity and demonstrate how the adversity, in this case, was their own stereotypes about their art. It’s beautiful!

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay uses the idea of sports to explore a more profound topic—growing through relationships. They really embrace using sports as an avenue to tell the reader about a specific experience that changed the way they approach the world. 

The emphasis on relationships is why this essay works well and doesn’t fall into a cliche. The narrator grows not because of their experience with track but because of their relationship with their coach, who inspired them to evolve and become a leader.

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The Best Sports Memoirs, According to Sports Journalists

Whether you’re a sports fan or just a history buff, looking back at sporting events has produced some of the world’s finest journalism. But it could be argued that no outside observers’ perspective can compare to being inside the heads of those who scored that game-winning point, series-winning run, or tournament-winning goal (or coached any teams that did). Which is why, with so many of our favorite sports still on pause as their leagues figure out how to resume competition, we realized getting lost in a good sports memoir could be the next best thing to spending hours watching a game itself. But with so many sports memoirs ghostwritten or scribbled in a hurry as a valedictory rite of passage, which ones are actually up to snuff?

To find out, we asked 17 experts — including sportswriters, broadcasters, and professors — for their recommendations. While their responses included memoirs written by many athletes who are household names, we also learned about stories told by others that the spotlight may have missed, and a few written by coaches or superfans with perspectives that are just as gripping as those of athletes who actually took the field. Read on for their picks, which we’ve organized by sport. In the tradition of our other reading lists, we’ve named any books with two or more recommendations as best overall. But we’ve also included titles emphatically recommended by just one person, for those who may want to dive further into any category.

Best tennis memoirs

Best overall tennis memoir.

Three people raved about this memoir, which journalist Jonathan Eig, the author of Ali: A Life , says “may be the all-time best-written memoir by a major athlete.” All who recommended it praised the book’s “shockingly” candid nature, pointing out Agassi’s honesty is especially rare for an athlete who was one of the most popular of his generation. “Few autobiographies have dared to show athletes so naked,” writer Sam Diss, the head of content at London-based soccer magazine Mundial , says, adding that Agassi is “not writing this book to stick the boot into old foes or people who screwed him out of money.” Instead, Diss says he’s “passed over, gone clear, and reveals his trauma and grudges with equal parts pain and catharsis, in a way that doesn’t feel point-scoring, but freeing.”

More recommended tennis memoirs

According to Dr. Amira Rose Davis, a Penn State professor of history and African-American studies who also co-hosts the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down , “the long history of black women in sport” is often obscured in sportswriting. But memoirs by black female athletes, which allow them to “narrate their own careers,” can “push us all to consider whose voices we are missing when we tell sports stories.” One of those women is tennis champion Althea Gibson, who wrote two memoirs that Davis recommends. “Gibson broke the color line at Wimbledon and was the first African-American Grand Slam champion,” she tells us. The first, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody, chronicles Gibson’s journey from childhood to the majors, while the follow-up, So Much to Live For, chronicles Gibson’s transition from the game to a golf career and beyond. Davis considers both essential reading, but notes that the details of Gibson’s post-career struggles in the latter work are especially poignant, and “serve as a reminder that being the queen of the tennis court is all well is good” but, as Gibson writes, “you can’t eat a crown.”

Editor’s note: These two books are now out of print and therefore priced higher than others on this list.

Another historic player, Arthur Ashe, remains the only black male tennis player to win Wimbledon (among other major titles). Marshall Jon Fisher, author of A Terrible Splendor says Ashe’s memoir has been one of his favorites since he was 12 years old. “Ashe told his life story in the context of a diary of one year on the tennis tour — Wimbledon 1973 to Wimbledon 1974,” Fisher tells us. “If only he’d known he would finally win the hallowed tournament in ’75, he might have waited a year. But then we wouldn’t have the same searching, melancholy masterpiece.”

This 1978 memoir of playing the world tennis circuit in the late 1950s and early 1960s is a “hilarious and poignant gem,” Fisher tells us. “In those days, the tour was more collegial, as well as more attainable for a cast of colorful characters more interested in seeking life experience than in becoming multimillion-dollar ground-stroke machines.” And lucky for readers, Forbes jotted down observations while he toured that “should entertain tennis fans forever,” according to Fisher.

Best baseball memoirs

Best overall baseball memoirs.

Three people told us about pitcher Jim Bouton’s book about his career with the New York Yankees and other teams in the ’60s. According to writer Daniel Okrent (who is credited with inventing the scoring system for fantasy baseball), it is “the memoir that broke the mold, earning Bouton the enmity of his fellow players and the applause of generations of fans” for its honest details of legendary players’ drunkenness, womanizing, and prodigious drug use (including some tales that, Okrent admits, “are less hilarious today”). Mark Kram, Jr., the author most recently of Smokin’ Joe: The Life of Joe Frazier , calls it a “bawdy tell-all” and an “instant sports literary classic.” Bouton was known for his wild knuckleballs, and Eig says that he “tossed the perfect knuckleball with this.”

This memoir by the one-time owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns, and Chicago White Sox was recommended to us by both Kram and former Grantland editor Rafe Bartholomew . “Baseball owners were a hidebound and altogether humorless bunch until Bill Veeck crashed the party,” according to Kram, who tells us that, “with a wooden leg, Veeck lugged home from the South Pacific in World War II, sent a dwarf to the plate, gave us the exploding scoreboard, and cooked up countless other promotional stunts that imbued a gray game with jump and color.” Kram says that Veeck’s memoir is “full of colorful tales and big ideas,” adding that he was fortunate enough to spend time with Veeck on a few occasions and that he “emerges in his book just as he was in person. One can almost hear his gravelly chuckle.”

More recommended baseball memoirs

Pitcher Jim Brosnan’s memoir focuses on his time playing for the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds in 1959. Okrent says that the memoir about Brosnan’s “unexceptional season with two unexceptional teams remains the most honest — and, I suspect, most accurate — account of the daily life of a ballplayer that we’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t meant to be a book filled with shocking revelations, according to Okrent, but is now thought of as one thanks to Brosnan’s inclusion of the Cardinals’ trainer “distributing an early form of steroids and amphetamines to the players.”

This bittersweet memoir tells the story of Pat Jordan’s promising, yet unfulfilled career as a pitcher. According to Kram, it’s a “hall-of-fame, lyrical memoir of youth ascendant and the hard luck that spares only the fortunate few.” Jordan began his career as a highly regarded schoolboy pitcher in 1950s Connecticut before, as Kram tells it, “signing with the Milwaukee Braves and spending three years toiling in bush league outposts such as McCook, Davenport, Waycross, Eau Claire and Palatka.” Then, 13 years after the Braves handed him his unconditional release, he revisited that period to write this — and later become “one of our preeminent sports journalists.”

Dirk Hayhurst succeeded where Pat Jordan did not, according to Kram, who notes he actually pitched in the big leagues (albeit briefly). Kram calls this, his second memoir, a “small gem,” noting it unfolds around and during his 2008 season with the San Diego Padres and offers a “candid account of the obstacles that he faced during his climb to the highest league, including conflicts with his eccentric grandmother, alliances and tensions with teammates, and the jitters he overcame when he finally got the call and discovered he was indeed out of his league.”

Best basketball memoirs

Best overall basketball memoirs.

Seven people recommended basketball memoirs, with two directing us to this one by NBA great and former U.S. senator from New Jersey, Bill Bradley. Both Bartholomew and Mike Tollin , an executive producer of ESPN’s The Last Dance , recommend the 240-page book that chronicles just 20 days in the life of Bradley’s time as a professional basketball player. Tollin, who told us he first learned about Bradley’s prowess by reading John McPhee’s famous 1965 profile of Bradley’s college basketball career at Princeton, says that reading the memoir “gave me an even greater appreciation for his humanity, and rare insight.”

“This classic deserves a much wider audience,” Eig tells us (Bartholomew is also a fan, as is Barack Obama, who called it the “best basketball book I’ve ever read.”) At the time he wrote it, Rick Telander was a faded football prospect who spent his time freelance writing and playing pickup basketball games in New York City. The memoir tracks his time observing and playing games at Flatbush’s Foster Park in the mid-1970s, and Telander rotates between observer, player, and team coach, reflecting throughout on the darker reality his fellow players from low-income neighborhoods would return to once the sun went down. “I remember Telander’s beautiful sentences, which feature his keen eye for detail, and his effortless blend of sociology and sport,” Eig says.

More recommended basketball memoirs

New York Times basketball and culture writer Sopan Deb recommends this 1980 memoir by legendary Boston Celtics center Bill Russell (who is regarded as the NBA’s first black superstar). “ Second Wind , in which he famously refers to Boston as a ‘flea market’ of racism, is an honest accounting by one of the most important athletes in the history of mankind,” Deb says.

Editor’s note: Due to this book’s recent popularity and the fact that it hasn’t been reissued (yet), we’re seeing it priced higher than others on this list.

Northwestern University’s director of sports journalism , J.A. Adande (who also appears on ESPN as a contributor), told us this is not only his favorite sports memoir, but that Abdul-Jabbar’s “fascinating perspectives” on race, religion, love, and America itself from the 1950s through the 1980s make it one of his favorite books ever. According to Adande, even though Abdul-Jabbar is one of the greatest players of all time, “basketball feels almost like an afterthought” in this book, or “something he pursued because he was tall and suited for it, but not something he felt as passionately about as, say, jazz.” Adande notes that Abdul-Jabbar has gone on to write dozens of books and essays on timely topics, and that “you can see the genesis of those in Giant Steps .”

Sports journalist and broadcaster Taylor Rooks told us about this memoir written by Tim Grover, a basketball trainer. But she assures he’s not just any trainer: “Tim Grover is the legendary trainer to athletes like Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, and Dwyane Wade.” The book, according to Rooks, focuses on the mental practices Grover taught these athletes (and others) to ensure they didn’t just have good seasons, but good careers. “It’s full of anecdotes and stories that make you feel closer to the players we all grew up watching,” she says, adding that it includes a favorite quote: “The only difference between feedback and criticism is the way you hear it.”

“My sports life has been consumed by two seminal NBA dynasties: the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Kobe-Shaq-Gasol Lakers,” sports and culture writer Dave Schilling says, adding that “those teams have one thing in common: head coach Phil Jackson.” According to him, anything Jackson wrote would have been a must-read given his shepherding of some of the greatest basketball players of all time, but Eleven Rings , which Schilling describes as memoir–cum–self-help book, goes the extra mile. “It gives an insight into how Jackson motivated his teams, which included a collection of massive egos, some of whom were not prone to taking orders,” he says. “It’s sort of a classic ‘Dad Lit’ book where the author delivers meme-able motivational insights.”

Best football memoirs

Best overall football memoir.

Four folks recommended books about American football, with three specifically highlighting George Plimpton’s memoir of his weeks-long athletic career (Plimpton, of course, is best known for helping to start the Paris Review). Diss describes the book as “the perfect encapsulation of a classic conversation starter: How long could you last in a match at professional level?” Spoiler alert: The answer, Diss points out (without giving the story away), is not long. “But Plimpton’s eloquence and brio propels this dive into American football in a way that’s both very funny and dredges up a newfound respect for even the lowliest pro athlete,” he explains. Okrent is also a fan, telling us “Plimpton’s weeks in uniform in the Detroit Lions’ training camp may have been a stunt, but the book is a gem. However bad Plimpton was as an NFL quarterback, he was that good as a writer — a truly winning combination.”

Another recommended football memoir

According to Rooks, this memoir, written by “one of the more polarizing figures in sports, forces us to ask many questions, especially ‘When does a person who did bad things qualify for the public’s forgiveness?’” Finally Free , Rooks says, tackles Vick’s search for that answer as he goes through his many controversies. “It stuck with me,” she says, “because it speaks to the idea that the bad things that happen to us shape us just as much as the good.”

Best soccer memoirs

Best overall soccer memoir.

While High Fidelity author Nick Hornby spent even less time playing professional sports than George Plimpton (a.k.a. no time at all), Fever Pitch was recommended to us as the ultimate fan’s memoir by three people, two of whom say they weren’t really fans of soccer before picking it up. The book “reads like a letter from a friend,” according to Diss, who describes the plot as “a fan in conversation with himself, in a doomed romance with his club, and asking what it all means to have those men chasing after a ball and those people standing there in the freezing cold and rain watching them do so.” Schilling says Fever Pitch was his entrée into the world of obsessive soccer fandom, telling us the prose “played right into my young-adult-male belief in intellectual and emotional purity. If you are going to love something — Arsenal, the Smiths, comic books, sketch comedy — you better love it to the point that it damages your ability to function in society or hold a job.” Sports journalist Sarah Baicker adds that you “probably don’t even have to care about sports to love the book, but if you do, as I do, you’ll recognize yourself in Hornby’s fandom.”

Another recommended soccer memoir

Wambach’s autobiography came recommended to us by sports reporter and commentator Kate Fagan . According to Fagan, the former star forward of the U.S. women’s national team “isn’t here to build her brand or make you love her, she’s here to be honest about her life, about her drinking, and about the inside workings about the peaks and valleys of being a professional athlete.” For that reason, she says that “if you want to really understand the grind of an athlete — read this.”

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Essay on Importance of Sports for Students and Children

500+ words essay on importance of sports.

First of all, Sport refers to an activity involving physical activity and skill . Here, two or more parties compete against each other. Sports are an integral part of human life and there is great importance of sports in all spheres of life. Furthermore, Sports help build the character and personality of a person. It certainly is an excellent tool to keep the body physically fit. Most noteworthy, the benefits of Sports are so many that books can be written.  Sports have a massive positive effect on both the mind and body.

Physical Benefits of Sports

First of all, Sports strengthen the heart. Regular Sports certainly make the heart stronger. Hence, Sport is an excellent preventive measure against heart diseases . This certainly increases the life expectancy of individuals. Furthermore, a healthy heart means a healthy blood pressure.

Sports involve physical activity of the body. Due to this physical activity, blood vessels remain clean. Sports reduces the amount of cholesterol and fats in the body. This happens because of the increase of flexibility of the wall of the blood vessels. The flexibility increases due to physical exertion, which is the result of Sports.

Furthermore, the sugar level in blood also gets lower thanks to Sports. The sugar certainly does not accumulate in the blood due to physical activity.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

A person experiences a good quality of breathing because of Sports. Sports strengthen the lungs of the body. Sports certainly escalate the lung capacity and efficiency of the body. Hence, more oxygen enters the blood which is extremely beneficial. Furthermore, there are fewer chances of developing lung diseases due to Sports.

Appropriate body weight is easy to maintain because of sports. A Sports playing person probably does not suffer from obesity or underweight problems. Sports certainly help the body remain fit and slim.

Furthermore, Sports also improves the quality of bones. A person who plays sports will have strong bones even in old age. Several scientific research reports that Sports prevent many diseases. For example, many researchers conclude that Sports prevent the development of cancer.

Other Benefits of Sports

Sport is certainly an excellent tool to build self-confidence . Playing Sports increases confidence to talk properly. A sport certainly improves the skills of communicating with others. Furthermore, the person experiences confidence in sitting, standing, and walking properly. Hence, Sports enriches the social life of an individual.

Sports bring discipline in life. It certainly teaches the values of dedication and patience. Sports also teach people how to handle failure. Furthermore, the importance of following a time schedule is also present in Sports.

Above all, Sports improves the thinking ability of individuals. Sports certainly sharpen the mind. Children who play Sports probably perform better at exams than those who don’t.

Finally, Sports reduces the stress of mind . A Sports playing person would certainly experience less depression. Sports ensure the peace of mind of those playing it. Most noteworthy, Sports brings happiness and joy in the life of individuals.

A sport is an aspect of human life that is of paramount importance. It certainly increases the quality of human life. Sports must be made mandatory in schools. This is because it is as important as education. Everyone must perform at least one Sport activity on a regular basis.

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Essay About Sport Example

10 December, 2020

11 minutes read

Author:  Donna Moores

Physical development plays a critical role in sustaining a healthy living and contributing to wellbeing in the long-term. Various topics on sports are relevant for both the young generation and older individuals at all times. For one, sport is a means of maintaining an excellent physical shape and great mobility; others perceive sports as a way to unwind and get one’s mind together. Alternatively, sport might let oneself learn about self-organization and discipline and experience its positive influence on life.

Regardless of the direction and type of activity, sports always brings out only the best: a team spirit, improved physical health, emotional fulfillment, and psychological relief. Since many youngsters might underestimate the benefits of sports, it is fundamental to emphasize its crucial role in determining one’s personality, health, and wellbeing. 

How to write an essay on sports?

If you so far have a vague idea of an essay about sport but still have enough time for writing, you are on the safe side. Here is what you should do to end up with a marvelous essay about sports.

First of all, try to pick a topic that is both relevant and not boring. By ensuring that the latter is the case, you will prevent yourself from writing meaningless stuff that isn’t even interesting to read. 

There are some tips that will help you stick to an appropriate essay format and save a great deal of time. Here is what you can take into account to take better control of your essay about sport writing:

• Research for a while and make sure you find some sound pieces of literature to back on in your writing
• Draft the main goals of your essay and come up with the question you are about to find answers to 
• Draft an outline and attach comments to each section of your outline. A short comment is a helper in elaborating an idea in each part of your outline
• Pick suitable arguments for each of the body paragraphs. Try to make sure that all the statements are actually reliable and relevant.

Make sure you prepare a piece of paper (or you may use any electronic device as an alternative) to write down your notes. It is always better to keep your drafts in a single place so that you don’t get lost in multiple notes. 

Sports Essay Topics 

If you want your next essay on sports to be an ultimate success, try picking a topic that will sound intriguing and be easy to comprehend at the same time. Below, we’ve listed a few indeed attention-grabbing topics that will be easy for you to elaborate on: 

• How regular sports correlates with a better quality of life 
• Essential skills that any type of sport requires
• Adverse effects of doping in sports 
• An example of a woman/man who went down into the history of sports
• New kinds of sports on the rise in 2021
• Sport has no gender: the women who rocked ‘male’ sports 
• The history of sports in your country
• Reasons for young generations to do sports 
• Arguments for deeming chess a sport 
• The influence of sports on mental health
• Sport and society
• The procedure of college admission for future sports students 

Structure of Essay on Sport 

Whether you are about to compose just a short essay about sport or your teacher expects you to develop a complex paper, the structure always remains similar. If you want to craft a useful outline that will prove its efficiency during the writing process, you first need to learn what the structure of an essay about sport looks like. Below we’ve listed the critical components of such an essay.

Introduction 

At this point, you are free to provide any piece of information that will sound convincing to the reader. This might be some statistical data, a historical fact, or a quote. Remember, your task is to encourage your reader to go through your essay and read it till the end. At the end of your paper, you will need to mention a thesis statement: a sentence that reveals what you will be talking about further.

Body paragraphs

Body paragraphs may contain any information that relates to your topic and a thesis statement. Any fact, statistical data, or a quote will be really welcome. A typical body paragraph follows such a structure:

• The topic sentence with a key idea. 
• Substantiated topic sentence and the main argument
• An example or any fact to make the opinion sound reasonable

In the last paragraph, just summarize the main points of your essay. You may briefly restate your introductory statements and explain how each of the body parts supports your thesis. Usually, there is only one thing you need to avoid in conclusion: repetitions. 

Problems with writing Your Essay About Sport? Try our Professional Essay Writer Service!

Essay Example 

The role of sports in promoting good mental health 

Sports is something that most people cannot imagine their everyday living without. The notion of sport had evolved in ancient times before the Olympic games in Greece started to take place. After the second industrial revolution, sport has become an extensively popular and admired subject in almost any school. As a means of entertainment and, at the same time, a way to relieve tension and move one’s energy in a good direction, the sport has always been associated with individual growth and physical health maintenance. These days, schoolers, students, adults, and older people engage themselves in a variety of sports activities for different reasons. But regardless of the purpose, all of them definitely achieve one target – better mental health. Indeed, performing sports activities regularly contributes to improved mental health by reducing stress, promoting a team spirit and social inclusion, and preventing depression. 

Engaging oneself in a sports activity is positively correlated with better social inclusion. In essence, sport is a team activity, which means that doing a particular kind of sports implies interaction with other individuals. Building social contacts while engaging in sports is exciting and easy: finding common ground with teammates or a sports partner is not complicated since you already share at least one significant interest. A recent study by British scientists suggests that individuals who did sports during their school years show higher social inclusion levels and can easily make new acquaintances in adult age. This means that sport plays a critical role in defining an individual’s future behavior in socializing with other people. And since sports promotes an ability to better engage in social groups and  make new acquaintances, it also contributes to an individual’s mental health. As long as humans live in a community and need communication for a healthy and happy living, sports is the key. 

Regular physical activity does not let stress accumulate and negatively influence one’s mental health. The reason why people experience less stress if they give preference to working out on a regular basis is endorphins production. Endorphins are particular neurotransmitters that a human brain produces as a result of physical activity. Neurotransmitters promote good feelings and make it harder for various stress factors to irritate oneself. Additionally, endorphins produced by a body while performing a sports activity promote a better quality of sleep. The latter, in its turn, leads to significant stress reduction as well. Apart from a guaranteed stress reduction, sports activities reduce the adverse effects of stress. Hence, one can come to the conclusion that since stress is an inevitable and highly annoying phenomenon, it is critical to seek preventative measures, and sports seems to cope with the issue of stress and constant tension brilliantly. Therefore, a moderate workout contributes to one’s mental health in the long term.  

Finally, sport has been proven to be one of the most potent remedies for depression. According to what clinicians claim, depression impacts both mental and physical health way worse than diabetes. Therefore, depression is a condition that needs treatment. However, it is highly possible to prevent depression just by exercising and adding some sport to one’s daily routine. Sports influence the human brain almost in the same way that medical drugs do: it promotes the brain’s better capacity to absorb serotonin. Not less important, sport activities contribute to nerve cell growth and prevent cells in the hippocampus from dying. Besides, physical activity has been found to improve self-esteem, which in turn improves body image and self-perception. Overall, a regular sport activity can not only guarantee depression alleviation but also prevent further disorders that have to do with psyche. 

All in all, sports can reasonably be deemed a natural remedy not only against physical but also multiple mental conditions. Just by performing moderate exercises a few times a week, one can make their life go in a different, healthier direction. Performing sports activities can reasonably promote stress-free life since exercising influences endorphins production in the brain. Additionally, a regular sport promotes better social inclusion and facilitates communication with peers. Finally, regular exercises serve as a solution to depression. It is critical to preserve one’s mental health, so working out is something to begin with straightaway.

Write an Essay with HandmadeWriting

While writing an essay about sport, it is essential to find the balance between the topic’s complexity and reader engagement. In other words, a winning essay about sport neither has a primitive subject, nor it covers a very specific and potentially boring sports topic. If this sounds quite complicated for you or if you merely have other reasons for leaving your writing for better times, you may get your paper done with HandmadeWriting . We are always available to assist you with your paper promptly. All you need to do is go to our website, submit paper instructions, and take care of yourself while we are taking care of your paper. 

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A Literary Magazine | Honest Reflections on Life's Leisurely Diversions

Best Americans

In these turbulent political times it’s good to know we’ve got some good Americans in our ranks. Since its early days, Sport Literate has attracted some of the best creative nonfiction writing in the nation, as evidenced by recognition in two anthologies:  The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Essays . We’re thrilled for Virginia Ottley Craighill for her recent honor in fall 2019.

Notable Essays in The Best American Sports Writing :

• Frank Soos, “Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod,” 1997
• Mark Wukas, “Running with Ghosts,” 1998
• Frank Soos, “On His Slowness,” 1999
• Molly Moynahan, “Don’t Walk,” 2000
• Jay Lesandrini, “Waiting on Deck,” 2010
• Frank Soos, “Another Kind of Loneliness,” 2013
• Dave Essinger, “Hallucinating in Suburbia: John Cheever, Buddha, and the Unabomber on the Urban Ultramarathon,” 2014
• Alessandra Nolan, “Channeling Mr. Jordan,” 2016
• Laura Legge, “The Responsible Player,” 2017
• Liz Prato, “Flights of Two,” 2018
• Eric Van Meter, “St. Anthony and Buddha Bike Through the Desert,” 2019
• Justina Elias, “Hard Cut,” 2020
• Mark Anthony Jarman, “A Nation Plays Chopsticks,” 2020
• Michael Kula, “How to Repair a Bicycle,” 2020
• John Julius Reel, “Touched by the Greatest,” 2020
• Cinthia Ritchie, “Random Numbers from a Summer of Alaska Trail Running,” 2020

Notable Essays in The Best American Essays :

• Michael Steinberg, “Elegy for Ebbets,” 2002
• William Huhn, “The Triple Crown,” 2004
• Robert Parker, “The Running of the Bull,” 2006
• Benedict Giamo, “Played Out,” 2009
• Peter Stine, “Detroit Marathon,” 2010
• Cinthia Ritchie, “Running,” 2012
• Katie Cortese, “Winning Like a Girl,” 2014
• Gayle Brandeis, “IceTown,” 2016
• Rachel Luria, “The Rush Gives Warmth Enough,” 2016
• Phillip A. Snyder, “Rental Horses,” 2016
• Michael J. Hess, “On the Morning After the Crash,” 2017
• Virginia Ottley Craighill, “The Lost Cause,” 2019
• William Loizeaux, “Sin and Baseball,” 2020
• Anthony D’Aries, “No Man’s Land,” 2021
• Sage Marshall, “Cutting the Ice,” 2021
• Dave Fromm, “Tool Town Left to its Own Devices,” 2022
• David Blumenfeld, “Reminences of an 84-year-old Boxing Fan,” 2022
• Sydney Lea, “The Cardinal, the Cops, and the Say-Hey Kid,” 2023

Republished Essays in The Best American Sports Writing :

• Mark Pearson, “The Short History of an Ear,” 2010
• Cinthia Ritchie, “Running,” 2012

The Best American Essays Notable Special Issues

• 2004 “Father’s Issue”
• 2006 “Retrospective Reflections”
• 2009 “Our Football Best”
• 2020 “Fight Club”

Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards:

• Patricia Anne McNair, “And These Are the Good Times,” creative nonfiction, 1998
• John Conway, “How to Serve,” creative nonfiction, 1998
• Michael McColly, “Christmas City, U.S.A.,” creative nonfiction, 2000

100+ Sports Essay Topics

Every student encounters an essay assignment at some point in their academic journey. For sports enthusiasts or those looking to delve deeper into the realm of sports, penning down a sports essay can be both enlightening and enjoyable. So, what exactly is a sports essay?

Table of Contents

What is a Sports Essay?

A sports essay is a piece of writing that discusses various aspects of sports, ranging from its history and significance to the various nuances associated with playing or watching sports. Such essays can be argumentative, descriptive, persuasive, or even narrative, depending on the purpose. While some might discuss the technicalities of a particular sport, others may focus on the social or psychological impacts of sports on individuals and society.

Guide on Choosing a Sports Essay Topic

Choosing the right sports essay topic is crucial. Here’s a brief guide to help you:

• Passion: Select a sport or aspect you’re passionate about; it will make your writing process smoother.
• Relevance: Consider current sports events or issues. Trending topics can make your essay more engaging.
• Depth: Ensure the topic has enough material for discussion. Too broad, and you may skim the surface; too narrow, and you might run out of points.

Exciting Sports Essay Topics Lists

Historical evolution.

• The history of the Olympic Games and their significance.
• Evolution of women in sports: From restrictions to dominance.
• The transformation of cricket: From test matches to T20.

Social & Psychological Aspects

• The influence of sports on a nation’s unity.
• How sports can combat teen depression.
• The correlation between team sports and leadership skills.

Controversies & Ethics

• The debate over performance-enhancing drugs.
• Should sports betting be legalized?
• The dilemma of politics in sports.

Physical & Health Impacts

• The benefits of sports on mental health.
• The risks and rewards of extreme sports.
• Childhood obesity: Can regular sports be the solution?

Economics of Sports

• The impact of mega sports events on host cities.
• Are athletes overpaid or rightly compensated?
• The business model behind sports merchandise.

Technological Innovations

• How technology is changing the way we watch sports.
• The role of VAR (Video Assistant Referee) in football: Blessing or curse?
• Wearable tech in sports: Enhancing performance or risking health?

Miscellaneous

• The role of sports in fostering global peace.
• The psychology behind sports fandom.
• How sports scholarships are shaping the future of talented athletes.

History & Evolution

• Origins and evolution of the World Cup.
• The transformative journey of Paralympic Games.
• Baseball’s historical significance in American culture.
• The progression of tennis: From grass courts to Grand Slams.
• Evolution of martial arts across the globe.

Societal Influence & Impact

• Role of sports in bridging cultural gaps.
• How sports can aid in community development.
• The influence of sports icons as societal role models.
• Sports and its contribution to global diplomacy.
• The paradigm of gender equality in sports.

Physical & Mental Health

• Marathon running and its effects on the human body.
• Yoga as a sport and its holistic benefits.
• Mental resilience in athletes: Nature or nurture?
• The role of sports therapy in physical rehabilitation.
• Combatting anxiety and depression through regular sports activities.

Sports Management & Economics

• Behind the scenes: Role of managers in team sports.
• The booming industry of sports tourism.
• Economic disparities in global sports events.
• The financial dynamics of sports sponsorships.
• Merchandising in sports: A look into the global market.

Sports Ethics & Controversies

• Should college athletes be paid?
• The ongoing debate about transgender athletes in competitive sports.
• Match-fixing scandals and their impact on sports integrity.
• The ethical implications of biological doping.
• The gray areas of sportsmanship on and off the field.

Technological Interventions

• The rise and significance of e-sports.
• Impact of drone technology in sports coverage.
• How AI is revolutionizing sports strategies.
• Virtual reality in sports training: A new era?
• Sports analytics: The game behind the game.

Cultural & Regional Perspectives

• Cricket in the Indian subcontinent: More than just a sport.
• Bullfighting: A controversial sport in Spanish culture.
• Rugby’s deep roots in New Zealand’s Maori culture.
• Sumo wrestling: A symbolic representation of Japanese tradition.
• Soccer in Latin America: A binding force or divisive tool?

Policy & Governance

• The effectiveness of policies against hooliganism in football.
• The politics behind hosting the Olympics.
• Influence of government policies on local sports.
• Sports governance: A comparative analysis between countries.
• Grassroots sports initiatives and their impact.

Training & Development

• The significance of youth academies in football.
• Modern techniques in athletic training: A paradigm shift?
• Scouting in sports: Art or science?
• The psychology behind coaching young athletes.
• Importance of nutrition in athlete development.

Future & Speculations

• The future of sports in a post-pandemic world.
• Rise of unconventional sports in the digital age.
• Sustainability in sports events: A growing necessity?
• Integration of augmented reality in live sports.
• The potential of metaverse in redefining sports consumption.

Innovations & Adaptations

• The surge of home workouts during global lockdowns.
• Incorporation of biomechanics in enhancing athlete performance.
• Role of sports psychologists in elite level competitions.
• Adaptation of traditional sports to urban environments.
• E-sports vs. traditional sports: A comparative study.

Diversity & Representation

• Role of sports in promoting LGBTQ+ rights and awareness.
• Racial representation and equity in global sports leagues.
• Women in sports journalism: Breaking barriers.
• The journey and challenges of refugee athletes.
• Sports as a medium for indigenous community representation.

Fitness Trends & Movements

• The rise of calisthenics as a popular fitness trend.
• Impact of celebrity fitness regimes on public behavior.
• Pilates vs. aerobics: Analyzing benefits and popularity.
• Role of sports and fitness influencers on social media.
• Wellness tourism and sports retreats: A growing trend.

Policies & Legalities

• The impact of athlete activism on sports organizations’ policies.
• Legal aspects of broadcasting rights in sports.
• Examining the intellectual property rights in sports merchandise.
• Health insurance policies for professional athletes: Adequacy and gaps.
• The dilemma of club vs. country: Legal and contractual battles in sports.

Sports & Education

• Importance of physical education in school curriculums.
• Balancing academic pressures with elite youth sports training.
• University sports scholarships: Opportunities and disparities.
• The role of interschool sports competitions in fostering talent.
• The influence of collegiate sports on university branding and appeal.

Struggling to pen down your thoughts? At writeondeadline.com , we offer exceptional essay writing services. Let our professionals craft a compelling sports essay for you! Dive deep into the world of sports without the stress of deadlines. Contact us now!

Useful References

• The History of Olympic Games
• Effects of Sports on Mental Health
• Sports and Technology Innovations

Essay on Sports: 100+ Topics and Examples

How to Write an Essay on Sports

Various sports, like basketball, tennis, and soccer, are popular among young and older generations worldwide. In addition to the fact that playing sports brings mental and physical health in shape, it also projects sportsmen and women's leadership skills. These role models give sports fans reasons to keep rooting for their favorite players and fuel young athletes' motivation to keep practicing and perfecting themselves in various youth sports.

If you are interested in professional sports or the career development of professional athletes, we encourage you to write a college essay on sports.

Choosing a relevant topic when writing an essay on sports requires deep knowledge of a specific sports industry and its representatives.

• Choose a topic of your interest. Usually, tasks we are genuinely curious about require equal mental stimulation but less tension and stress. For instance, you could choose the topic of the influence of physical fitness on mental health in case you are interested in health science.
• Look for relevant resources to provide trustworthy and valuable information regarding the shortlist of sports essay topics. For example, you could check out famous journals that prioritize writing about physical activity and sports cultures, such as the British Journal of Sports Medicine or the Journal of Human Sport and Exercise.
• After gathering relevant data, list the major issues you will write about in the sports essay. For instance, if you'd rather concentrate on the features your favorite athlete acquires, we suggest you write on persuasive sports essay topics. Highlight the major events in the sports career of chosen male or female athletes that helped them go pro.
• Construct an essay outline highlighting the major points you will touch down throughout your essay. This will loosen the essay writing process and will save some time for you as well.
• As you point out the major issue of reflection in the thesis statement part of your introductory paragraph, proceed with the body paragraphs of arguments supporting your perspective regarding the statement.

Keep reading to find a variety of essay topics like an essay on sports day in English, as well as specified issues relating to sports competitions, such as an essay on concussions in sports, etc.

Essay Topics on Sports

College students who are interested in doing and writing about sports can find many essay topics listed below on sports ranging from Olympic games to performance-enhancing drugs, sports nutrition to sports injuries, and so on.

Persuasive Essay Topics on Sports

• Cross-country skiing is the most dangerous winter sport.
• American universities should pay college athletes
• Ice-Skating is the most aesthetically pleasing sport.
• Soccer is one of the most played college sports in the US.
• Alcohol consumption should be prohibited during the Olympic games.
• More awareness should be raised about racist team players in all kinds of sports.
• FIFA's primary mission is to promote intercultural relations.
• We should reconsider the age range of baseball players.
• There is a link between team sports and math.
• Dealing with Medicine is the most disputable issue of the Olympic Games.
• Sports culture in the US is much higher than in East European countries.
• Cricket should be included in the Summer Olympics.
• The UEFA Championship promotes youth sports.
• The New Orleans Saints as a revolutionary NFL team.
• Everyone should be developed at least in one sport.
• Fitness obsession is a benefit for physical health.
• Sports nutrition is more important than physical activity.
• Dancing is one of the best confidence boosters.
• The rise of Charlotte Horne's value because of MJ.
• International teams in football attract a wide range of audience.

Feel free to ask to ' write me an essay ' on a wide range of persuasive essay topics on sports. Our writers are always at your service to help you achieve academic success.

Argumentative Essay Topics on Sports

• Should major sports events be taken in politically dangerous zones?
• Sports programs should be accessible through all types of TV channel packages.
• Transgender athletes should have the freedom to choose their own pronouns.
• Current sports organizations are corrupt.
• Athletic training should be psychological too.
• Soccer is number one of the most popular sports around the US.
• The most quality games were played at the World Cup 2022.
• School athletics should be paid for.
• American football is not popular around the world.
• Ice hockey is the most dangerous of winter sports.
• Sporting events are mostly watched during work days.
• Physical exercise is as important as mental through athletic development.
• Sports psychology: implementation of a mental training course for student-athletes.
• Many current sports organizations degrade women's sports.
• Sports history: development of baseball around the USA.
• Playing sports should be obligatory for school children.
• Professional athletes should be paid more in Western European countries.
• Toxic masculinity ruins the success of team sports.
• Cheerleading should be part of the Olympic games.
• Are video games sports?

Simply ask to do my paper on various argumentative essay topics on sports and receive the high-quality finished product in the nick of time.

Essay on Sports and Games in School

• Should sports be made compulsory in schools?
• The impact of promoting Air Jordans on developing a winner's mindset in school children.
• The importance of having sports clubs in schools.
• Should school sports participation be an excuse to miss classes?
• Governments should encourage more youngsters to play school sports.
• Is sports a solution to the current mental health crisis in school children?
• Should governments promote more opportunities for high schoolers to pursue aesthetically pleasing sports?
• Which sport is most popular among youngsters around the US?
• Should prospective basketball players be rejected due to height measures in school basketball teams?
• The importance of physical therapy in high school athletes.
• Does sport teach the importance of teamwork?
• Should parents encourage students to play sports?
• Can the gym be a substitute for physical fitness?
• Do sports conflict with academic learning?
• Sports medicine application to mental exhaustion in school athletes.
• Does sport help students develop leadership skills?
• Is playing chess stimulating analytical thinking?
• Importance of media coverage of sports events.
• The pressure of performance in sports
• The chances of school students making it into the national basketball team.

Argumentative Essay on Gender Inequality in Sports

Check out some of the best sports essay topics if you are willing to write an argumentative essay on gender inequality in sports:

• Why are female athletes paid less than their male counterparts in most sports?
• Male athletes have more chances of going pro in basketball than women.
• Club sports exclude some players based on gender.
• Male and female athletes are equally resilient to sports injuries.
• Soccer and Ice hockey are male-dominated sports.
• The marketing strategies of UCR's Women's Basketball are inefficient.
• Height should not be a decisive factor for either men's or women's basketball.
• Gender prejudices discriminate against myriads of potentially successful athletes in various sports.
• National teams should be completed with males as well as females.
• Women's sports are not valued as much as Men's sports.
• Sports medicine is actively used by female athletes under pressure to enhance performance.
• The number of female athletes participating in the Olympic games should increase.
• Fewer female students choose to play sports after graduating from high school compared to the number of male students.
• Negative psychological aspects of post-traumatic stress disorder in athletes.
• More female students should be encouraged to play sports while performing their academic duties.
• Comparatively, more men make it to major league baseball than women.
• Performance-enhancing drugs adversely affect growing healthy muscle groups.
• Ancient sports like the ancient Greek Olympics have nothing in common with modern Olympic games.
• Lack of women professional football players in America.
• Women's soccer is less promoted by European high schools than Men's.

If you have already surpassed the age of school and you're currently working on an essay on sports and games in school or trying to write an essay on sports event in school, do not hesitate to contact our dissertation writers to hire .

Running Short on Time to Write Sports Essay?

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Essay on Benefits of Games and Sports

Playing professional sports brings about its advantages. Consider writing an essay on benefits of games and sports and choose from a wide variety of topics below:

• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved concentration
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Increased dopamine and serotonin level
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved mood
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved sleeping habits
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Reduced stress and depression
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Boosted Self-confidence
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Development of leadership traits
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved mental health
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Healthy sleeping habits
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Maintaining healthy body weight
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved academic performance in school children
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Better scholastic outcomes
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Active blood circulation
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Developing school athletes as better team players
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Enhanced analytic thinking
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Effective multitasking
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Improved mental and physical health.
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Opportunity to develop a career outside the home nation.
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Better communication skills.
• Benefits of Playing Sports: Smart time management.

Essay on My Favorite Sports Person

Famous sports figures often inspire school students. Take a look at the list of topics to write an essay on my favourite sports person:

• Roger Federer: my favorite tennis player
• Tiger Woods: the best golfer in the US
• Cristiano Ronaldo: The GOAT of GOATs.
• Rafael Nadal: the most prominent tennis player in Spain
• Kevin Durant: the rising star of the NBA
• Lebron James: the best basketball player in the modern NBA
• Usain Bolt: greatest sprinter of all time
• Alexi Lalas: most beloved American soccer player
• Michael Schumacher: seven-time World Champion
• Frank Thomas: greatest baseball player
• Shaun White: the best American snowboarder
• Jennie Finch: most honorable softball player in America
• Dirk Nowitzki: the guy who beat Lebron James.
• Kevin Garnett: most emotional and dedicated in NBA
• Ray Bourque: the best of hockey players
• Billie Jean King: Honor for women tennis players
• Bill Elliot: Nascar's most popular driver
• Mark Messier: greatest leader in hockey history
• Khvicha Kvaratskhelia: Rising star of European football
• Maradona: most prominent soccer player of all time

Feel free to write an essay on sports and games for 10th class from the above topics.

Persuasive Essay on Sports Betting

If you decide to write a persuasive essay on sports betting, take some inspiration from the topics below:

• Beginners should be taught how to place a bet.
• Money-line betting is addictive
• Sports betting should be prohibited under the 18
• Betting on NFL wins totals
• Scandal and controversy in sports are always connected to betting
• Game theory has a direct relation to gambling
• Online casinos should be banned
• Math is used in gambling to assess the risks of winning
• Sports bettors are great analysts
• Mobile betting is a better option than desktop
• Sportsbooks are the main guide to learning sports betting
• Gambling is more entertaining than addictive
• The FIFA World Cup has the biggest betting volume
• The Super Bowl makes up half of all sports bets summed up
• Kentucky Derby is one of the highest-rated betting events in horse racing
• The Grand National horse racing attracts the highest sports bettings around the UK
• Las Vegas is the best gambling destination in the world
• Singapore has one of the strictest gambling rules in the world
• Monte Carlo is the classiest gambling point
• Aruba is the Vegas of the Caribbean

Common App Essay on Sports

You can easily craft top-notch essays related to sports in your college application. Take some of the examples from the topics listed below, and do not hesitate to write a common app essay on sports.

• Learning to take constructive criticism as a soccer player
• Sports is the greatest teacher of teamwork
• Keeping a winner mindset through the challenges of chess
• How I Learned to be a leader through my college sports experience
• Basketball taught me the value of my own contribution to the team's success
• How Failures in soccer championships boosted my self-confidence
• The constant practice resulted in major success: how sport taught me the value of invested work
• How I learned to appreciate my body through the aesthetics of ice skating
• Hip-Hop dancing is the best teacher of networking with people of multicultural origins
• Winning a national tournament in swimming after numerous defeats
• Overcoming a sports injury and going back to a fresh start taught me resilience
• Being a part of the basketball team helped me better perceive my athletic abilities
• Coming from a family of immigrants, my soccer team helped me develop a sense of belonging on American land
• Being a high school student and an athlete led me to better time management
• Baseball player enhanced my concentration skills; within me
• Getting in touch with professional sports persons and mentors led me to personal growth
• Learning from mistakes and using defeat for my own benefit is what playing ice hockey taught me
• Running on the track made me become mentally sharp
• I learned how to lead the game through soccer
• Playing sports led me to broaden my network of professionals

Sample College Essay on Sports

The winning mindset plays a major role in helping athletes develop to the best of their potential. The profound legend of modern-day basketball, Michael Jordan is one of those rare athlete leaders that set an example for millions of college basketball players in and out of the USA on mastering his mind and shaping himself through tough discipline. Therefore, if you are interested in sports psychology, you could pick a related topic and represent an athlete or specific sports teams that similarly show off psychological discipline through their performance that later results in their success.

We have prepared a sample essay on sports below. Examine it carefully to understand a sports research paper format better!

Final Words

We are hoping that not only have you gained some ideas about essay topics on sports, but you are also leaving this article with the motivation to keep working despite any rejections or failures that come along the way.

Meanwhile, you can always use a research paper writing help service, and our experts will guide you through your winning essay writing process.

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Provide us with any trending sports essay topics, and trust our experts to construct a winning essay for you.

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Why is Baseball the Most Literary of Sports?

Lincoln michel goes deep into the prose of america’s pastime.

The World Series is here. Even though it’s the (ugh) Braves vs. the (ugh) Astros, it’s still time to put on a ballcap, break out of a box of Cracker Jack, and head on out to the old ballgame… or least stream one online. Baseball has been known as America’s “national pastime” since the 1850s. While the sport may have been surpassed by football in the TV ratings, there’s still something about wooden bats, leather gloves, and grass-and-dirt diamonds that feels distinctly American. And distinctly literary.

Baseball has a tremendous literary history, one that stretches back through decades and across literary genres. Baseball appears in postmodern comedies like Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association (1968) , horror stories like Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (2010), fabulist novels such as W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), YA fantasy like Michael Chabon’s Summerland (2002), and works of literary realism like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League (2020). Pick a literary genre and you can find baseball books.

I added my own contribution with my science fiction novel The Body Scout . My novel takes place in a future New York City ravaged by climate change, pandemics, and body modifications, in which genetic editing is as common as cellphone apps are today. When I started writing, I knew I wanted to explore questions of the body and technology and center it in a future sports league run by biotech and pharmaceutical corporations. I had a lot of hard decisions to make about worldbuilding and plot and character, but there’s one thing I didn’t think twice about: the sport would be baseball.

Sports and literature aren’t always the best pairing. Novelists are classically weirdos and introverts, more likely to be bullied by the jocks than compete with them. There are some hugely popular sports that have almost no novels about them. So why is it that baseball has had such an enduring literary appeal?

I. A Quick Look at the Literary History of Baseball

Baseball novels stretch back to the 19th   century with the first such novel apparently having been written by Noah Books in 1884 . As the sport grew in popularity, it found its way into the popular dime novels of the day. Zane Grey is mostly remembered for his Westerns, but the author had gone to college on a baseball scholarship and wrote several books of baseball fiction.

When we talk about baseball as literature in the more snooty sense, one of the earliest classics—and indeed arguably the classic baseball novel—is Bernard Malamud’s 1952 debut novel The Natural , which was based in part on the life of Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus. Malamud would go on to win the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for later work, and his debut helped cement baseball as a thoroughly literary topic. This novel was famous enough to be parodied in the classic The Simpsons episode “Homer at the Bat,” in which Homer—like Malamud’s Roy Hobbs—has a lucky bat carved by a lightning-struck tree.

Malamud’s friend (and sometimes rival), Philip Roth wrote his own baseball novel two decades later with 1973’s satirical The Great American Novel .

The great postmodernist trickster Robert Coover wrote his baseball novel in the early innings of his career. His second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), followed an accountant who escapes from his dreary life into a dice-simulated baseball game.

I mentioned W.P. Kinsella’s sports fantasy novel Shoeless Joe (1982) above, although most know it better in its film adaptation form: Field of Dreams (1989). Kinsella leaned fully into the mythic quality of baseball in that novel, and he wrote other magic and mystic baseball works. His collection The Dixon Cornbelt League: And Other Baseball Stories (1993) includes, for example, a werewolf baseball story titled appropriately, “The Baseball Wolf.”

One can’t bring up the literary history of baseball without Don DeLillo’s phenomenal Underworld (1997), which opens with an extended fictionalized account of the New York Giant Bobby Thomson’s game-winning homer against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. The real life homerun was so famous it’s simply called the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” DeLillo’s own version was also famous enough, at least in literary circles, that it was eventually published as a standalone novella, Pafko at the Wall , in 2001.

More recently, Chad Harbach’s college baseball novel The Art of Fielding (2011) famously secured a massive $665,000 advance—extremely rare for a debut novel, much less one about sports—and was released to wide acclaim. In 2020, when COVID forced the MLB to play a shortened season in empty stadiums, we saw two more notable baseball novels: Gish Jen’s dystopian The Resisters saw baseball as location of resistance in an authoritarian future America while Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League explored the lives of a wide variety of characters during spring training.

These books are of course only a small sampling of the baseball literature out there. The Library of America’s Baseball: A Literary Anthology includes Amiri Baraka, John Updike, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Yusef Komunyakaa, and many more poets and novelists who found baseball making an appearance in their work.

II. The Quirks and Lingo of America’s Sport

Why does baseball translate so well to the page?

Part of the answer is the basic nature of the game. Baseball plays out largely in a series of one-on-one matchups with very clear dramatic stakes. Do you hit the ball or swing and miss? Get on base or strike out? Catch the ball or get an error? Not only are the stakes clear from moment to moment, but the game is played out over a lot of tension-building downtime punctuated with short bursts of dramatic action. While haters will say this makes the game boring to watch, it certainly makes it easier to render on the page. The chaotic non-stop action of sports like hockey and basketball are trickier to pull off in text.

Of course, the literary appeal of baseball runs much deeper. For one thing, the sport is simply unique. It has runs instead of points, managers instead of coaches, a diamond instead of a rectangle, and an offense that never gets to hold the ball. The uniforms feel time-warped from another era. It’s weird. But even more than the quirks, the language of baseball is everywhere in America.

We talk of “knocking it out of the park” when we do well and “striking out” when we fail. We “touch base” with old friends, guestimate “ballpark figures” in office meetings, and take a “rain check” to reschedule a plan. (Back in the day, if it rained too heavily to continue the game fans would be given a “rain check” voucher to use at another game.) We separate things into the “big leagues” and “bush leagues.” Sometimes life “throws a curveball” when something comes right “out of left field.” Other times we have to “play hardball” with someone or apologize for talking too much “inside baseball.”

Baseball’s long cultural importance in American life means that the sport has given us far more terms, phrases, and idioms that most other sports. Its language is part of America’s language—and what are authors if not people attuned to language?

III. Baseball as the Flexible American Metaphor

All of the above combines with baseball’s long and storied history, which has often dovetailed into larger American narratives. Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the racist color line. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech . Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. The 1990s steroid era. Baseball also winds its way through people’s lives, from elementary school t-ball to middle age office softball leagues. It’s perhaps the sport that best cuts across class, race, gender, age, and the urban/rural divide (even as it’s infused with the conflicts of those categories).

So baseball in literature tends to stand in for America. It might represent an earnest nostalgia, such as in Kinsella’s work. It may reflect the small anxieties of average Americans as in Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association. Or it might be used to examine the great forces of history that shaped the country, as in DeLillo’s Underworld when J. Edgar Hoover is informed of Soviet nuke tests during a game, or in Roth’s The Great American Novel when the Cold War is fought out over a fictional baseball league. In literature, baseball can represent any part of American life the author needs.

Elements used in literature accrue meaning the more they are used. The fact that baseball has appeared in so many literary works—not to mention films like A League of Their Own and The Sandlot and the countless other movies, video games, comics, and television shows—has imbued it with extra meaning. This is why, I think, baseball is at home in a horror novel or science fiction TV show as it is a Pulitzer Prize’s winners work. It’s a flexible metaphor, one artists can use to explore all different aspects of America. This is why I knew my novel would be about baseball. I wanted to tap into that rich and storied tradition.

So this World Series, if you’re looking for something to do between innings why not pick up a baseball novel and read?

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Lincoln Michel

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• Essay On Importance Of Sports

Essay on Sports

500+ word essay on the importance of sports.

Sports keep us healthy and active. We can have a healthy mind only when we have a healthy body. We can achieve anything in our lives if we have a healthy body and a peaceful mind. Physical and mental well-being comes naturally when we involve ourselves in sports activities. Sports help in improving our overall personality and make us more active and attentive. Here, students can find a 500+ Words Essay on the Importance of Sports where we will be discussing how important a role sports plays in our life.

Essay on the Importance of Sports

The topic of sports is very broad. It can serve as a form of therapy and a tool in different aspects of life, which can help change the world. Through sports, children develop physical skills, exercise, be team players, and improve their self-esteem. Sports play a significant role in advancing education and in enhancing knowledge.

Playing sports means regular exercising, jogging, going to the fitness centres or playing any game. There are different types of games involved in sports activities. Each game has its own specific rules. These sports activities are done either by individuals or teams for leisure, and entertainment as well as to compete against one another. Playing sports improves the physiological functions of the body organs and improves the functionality of the entire body system. Through sports, we learn different skills like leadership, patience, coordination, motivation, and team effort.

Sport has great importance in building personality, too. For some people, it is not only the body movement or playing strategy, but it’s a life philosophy. In the modern world, a positive attitude to sports is becoming a trend and style. Young people try to look sporty, fit and full of energy. A sports career in India was considered less lucrative in the past. However, now it has become one of the gainful professional options for students. Sometimes students take an interest in sports merely for adventure and a tension-free life. Now, sports games are gaining popularity. Various sports competitions are played at the international level, such as the Olympics. Apart from it, multiple matches and inter-city competitions are organised to promote the field of sports.

Benefits of Sports and Games

Nowadays, we can see problems related to unhealthy lifestyles. We sit more and more on the couch, surrounded by modern technologies. We don’t realise the importance and benefits of sports and physical activities. The lack of physical activity in our body leads to obesity and many other health problems such as heart disease and so. It has become a necessity of today’s world that all of us do daily physical activities or play any sports for a minimum of 30 minutes.

Regular physical activity benefits health in many ways. It helps build and maintain healthy bones, muscles and joints, controls weight, reduces fat, and prevents high blood pressure. Children who participate in physical activities such as sports, experience positive health benefits. These health benefits include a decreased risk of high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Also, these children are less likely to smoke or use drugs and alcohol than children who don’t participate in sports.

Keep learning and stay tuned with BYJU’S for the latest update on CBSE/ICSE/State Board/Competitive Exams. Also, download the BYJU’S App for interactive study videos.

Frequently asked Questions on the Importance of Sports Essay

Why is playing sports important for us.

Playing sports not only helps in the active functioning of our body but also helps in flexibility and reduces the chances of falling sick.

Which was the first sport to be played in the world?

Wrestling is said to have been the first sport played in the world, depictions of the same can be found in the caves of France.

Which is the most famous sport in the world?

Football is ranked as the top sport with 3.5 billion followers, seconded by Cricket.

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Essay Samples on Sports

When college athletes have to start with an academic writing task, they often feel lost and do not know how to start. It’s exactly the same with other academic subjects because one should take time and find inspiring information that can be used unless you already have a prompt. You can focus on the importance of sports or talk about the pros of recreational sports and spending time outside. See our sport essay example as a starting point and learn how to structure your writing correctly. Your introduction part should start with a brief introduction or statistical information that explains your writing objectives or the peculiarities of the problem that you plan to address. The majority of college essays about sports that you see below will provide you with inspiring ideas and teach you how to implement various quotes without falling into the plagiarism trap. If you want to use some source, remember that you must introduce it first and explain why it is there. When you’re talking about the use of medication in college sports, turn to some stats and explain why these are important or biased as you research. It will help you to add an author’s voice. 

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How To Write A Great Essay On Sports?

Table of Contents

ESPN points out that in the U.S., the number of young people engaged in competitive sports is larger than the population of Texas; SFIA estimates the number at 21.47 million.

Sport is a topic of great interest throughout generations. Being an activity that is good for both body and mind, it is often favored by teachers who delight in assigning essays on sport in its various aspects: sport and youth, sport and its problems, sport and its values.

These are some of the factors that determine the current and unwaning interest in the subject.

How to write an essay on sports?

Do not be under a false impression that you have all the time in the world. Once you get to it, the task may start taking more time than you may think it would, so plan accordingly.

It is always best to err on the safe side when you leave out time for every part of your written assignment.

We suggest to break your essay writing into the following parts:

• Find materials related to the topic of sports, specifically to the narrower topic that you chose to write on.
• Study the materials and extract the most important information you are going to make use of.
• Outline the problems you are going to solve in your essay.
• Create a draft for your introduction with thesis and method introduced comprehensibly.
• Proceed to write the main paragraphs . Prove your viewpoints and back them up by making use of the resources you found in the initial stages of your research.

Do not underestimate the importance of arranging your essay writing notes, so that you can quote the sources clearly and logically.

This will help you lead your reasoning to relatable conclusions.

Stunning essay topics on sports

• Sport and doping.
• Idolizing athletes in popular sports.
• Most popular sports by country.
• Why youth should be engaged in sports.
• Sport skills classification.
• Sports and gender differences.
• The perceptual style in sports.
• Body confidence in sports.
• Women in traditionally male sports.
• Professional sports poses more health risks than it brings benefits.
• College admission for athletes.
• Role of competitive sports in youth development.
• Gender typing of sports.
• Is video gaming a sport?
• Why is chess sports?
• Amateur vs. professional sports.
• New kinds of sports in 2019.
• The educational value of sports.
• The importance of physical activity in advanced age.
• The history of sports.
• Olympics: from Ancient Greece to the present day.
• Why is yoga sports?
• Sport in society.
• The future of sports science.
• Sports terminology in idioms.

Persuasive essay topics on sports

So, you have been assigned to write a persuasive essay on the importance of sport, but you have no idea what to write or how to structure the text?

While the essay of sports lends itself to being analyzed from numerous points of view, a persuasive essay has a very precise structure, which differs from the classic essay.

How you define an argumentative essay ? Well, it would require you to write on a topic that sounds like you need to persuade your readers. Moreover, you’d need to make them see the matter from your point of view.

…Need a sample of a topic like this?

Cheerleading is a sports essay.

Sounds like a nice choice.

Pro essay writing service conclude that the purpose of writing a persuasive essay is in providing a well structured and logical reasoning of own viewpoint, that is supported by facts, numbers, and other data. Also, one needs to argue the antithesis constructively. This means respecting the opposing standpoint and being able to come up with counter-arguments.

…Need help?

Here is one of the best outlines for a persuasive essay! There’s no better place to start.

• Introduction . Present the subject and highlight the importance of the chosen topic.
• Introduce your thesis + the viewpoint you want to promote to your readers.
• Present the information (facts, statistics, graphs, tables) that proves your standpoint.
• Antithesis . Present opinions contradictory to yours and write the reasons for which you consider them weak.
• Conclusion . Sum up the facts presented above, and reiterate your opinion.

Classification essay on sports

When tasked with writing a classification essay, you should focus on a relevant principle that you will apply to your classification of sports or related phenomena into groups, and apply the same principle throughout.

Indicate a method you use for classification of sports into categories.

For instance…

Sports can be classified based on type and intensity applied: dynamic (isotonic) and static (isometric).

Adhere to the following scheme when writing a classification essay on sport:

• Think of the categories .
• Use a single classification principle .
• Exemplify each category.

Essay samples

We call “sport” any activity that requires a psycho-physical effort on the part of those who carry it out and has a recreational intent. People have enjoyed both these characteristics in sporting activities since the times of Greeks and Romans. Athletes performed in various disciplines before an audience: from the beginning, therefore, the sport had a role in entertainment and life of individuals.

In sports, two components are joined together: on the one hand, we have the physical effort required on the part of the athlete, and on the other, the entertainment aspect offered to the spectators. The athletes’ physical and mental efforts are rewarded through various sources of remuneration; these sources can in part be traced precisely in the proceeds from ticket sales, merchandising, and sponsors’ investments.

Athletes are required to maintain a high level of performance for a longer or shorter period. Some sports completely take over the lives of those who perform them at high levels (such as football in Italy or baseball in America), by providing very high salaries and care of all kinds, from medical to everyday life management.

However, there are other athletes who, despite representing their country in all national and international sporting events, maintain more than one occupation and have to deal with the difficulties and commitments we all face from time to time.

The tendency to idealize athletes who, due to their performance or their personality, succeed in gaining public attention, has allowed some of them to lead, in parallel with sporting activities, a second career. In some cases, this is a performance through excesses and sensationalism. In others instead, these people have managed to lay the foundations to be able to reinvent themselves as sports commentators, coaches or in other careers, to secure a future even after closing that window of strength and agility that characterizes the young body but do not last forever.

Ever since man invented the sporting events, the link between physical activity and entertainment has always been very tight: the athletes of ancient Greece were remembered as great footballers of the past.

It is sad to realize that some sports and some athletes get practically no recognition comparing to their more famous cousins. Moreover, they are almost ignored, even when the services offered by those who practice them allow the home team to qualify or win international competitions. Perhaps with an education in sport that broadens the panorama beyond the “usual” football, these sports workers would also get the glory they deserve.

On balance…

Writing about sports can be fun, especially if you are a sports enthusiast. For instance, if you are a football fan, writing why football is the best sports essay should not be a problem at all!

Or you can come up with something even more exciting, like Should video games be considered sport? argumentative essay.

Just remember to support your opinion with proven facts from trusted sources, logically structure your essay, quote your sources, sound persuasive in an academic way, and proofread your essay. That’s a maelstrom of conditions making your copy worth an “A”!

No time to write your essay on sports? Buy argumentative essay from our writers who are here to help you out! Click the button to learn more.

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40 Best Essays of All Time (Including Links & Writing Tips)

I wanted to improve my writing skills. I thought that reading the forty best essays of all time would bring me closer to my goal.

I had little money (buying forty collections of essays was out of the question) so I’ve found them online instead. I’ve hacked through piles of them, and finally, I’ve found the great ones. Now I want to share the whole list with you (with the addition of my notes about writing). Each item on the list has a direct link to the essay, so please click away and indulge yourself. Also, next to each essay, there’s an image of the book that contains the original work.

About this essay list:

Reading essays is like indulging in candy; once you start, it’s hard to stop. I sought out essays that were not only well-crafted but also impactful. These pieces genuinely shifted my perspective. Whether you’re diving in for enjoyment or to hone your writing, these essays promise to leave an imprint. It’s fascinating how an essay can resonate with you, and even if details fade, its essence remains. I haven’t ranked them in any way; they’re all stellar. Skim through, explore the summaries, and pick up some writing tips along the way. For more essay gems, consider “Best American Essays” by Joyce Carol Oates or “101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think” curated by Brianna Wiest.

40 Best Essays of All Time (With Links And Writing Tips)

1. david sedaris – laugh, kookaburra.

A great family drama takes place against the backdrop of the Australian wilderness. And the Kookaburra laughs… This is one of the top essays of the lot. It’s a great mixture of family reminiscences, travel writing, and advice on what’s most important in life. You’ll also learn an awful lot about the curious culture of the Aussies.

Writing tips from the essay:

• Use analogies (you can make it funny or dramatic to achieve a better effect): “Don’t be afraid,” the waiter said, and he talked to the kookaburra in a soothing, respectful voice, the way you might to a child with a switchblade in his hand”.
• You can touch a few cognate stories in one piece of writing . Reveal the layers gradually. Intertwine them and arrange for a grand finale where everything is finally clear.
• Be on the side of the reader. Become their friend and tell the story naturally, like around the dinner table.
• Use short, punchy sentences. Tell only as much as is required to make your point vivid.
• Conjure sentences that create actual feelings: “I had on a sweater and a jacket, but they weren’t quite enough, and I shivered as we walked toward the body, and saw that it was a . . . what, exactly?”
• You may ask a few tough questions in a row to provoke interest and let the reader think.

2. Charles D’Ambrosio – Documents

Do you think your life punches you in the face all too often? After reading this essay, you will change your mind. Reading about loss and hardships often makes us sad at first, but then enables us to feel grateful for our lives . D’Ambrosio shares his documents (poems, letters) that had a major impact on his life, and brilliantly shows how not to let go of the past.

• The most powerful stories are about your family and the childhood moments that shaped your life.
• You don’t need to build up tension and pussyfoot around the crux of the matter. Instead, surprise the reader by telling it like it is: “The poem was an allegory about his desire to leave our family.” Or: “My father had three sons. I’m the eldest; Danny, the youngest, killed himself sixteen years ago”.
• You can use real documents and quotes from your family and friends. It makes it so much more personal and relatable.
• Don’t cringe before the long sentence if you know it’s a strong one.
• At the end of the essay, you may come back to the first theme to close the circuit.
• Using slightly poetic language is acceptable, as long as it improves the story.

3. E. B. White – Once more to the lake

What does it mean to be a father? Can you see your younger self, reflected in your child? This beautiful essay tells the story of the author, his son, and their traditional stay at a placid lake hidden within the forests of Maine. This place of nature is filled with sunshine and childhood memories. It also provides for one of the greatest meditations on nature and the passing of time.

• Use sophisticated language, but not at the expense of readability.
• Use vivid language to trigger the mirror neurons in the reader’s brain: “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows”.
• It’s important to mention universal feelings that are rarely talked about (it helps to create a bond between two minds): “You remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings when the lake was cool and motionless”.
• Animate the inanimate: “this constant and trustworthy body of water”.
• Mentioning tales of yore is a good way to add some mystery and timelessness to your piece.
• Using double, or even triple “and” in one sentence is fine. It can make the sentence sing.

4. Zadie Smith – Fail Better

Aspiring writers feel tremendous pressure to perform. The daily quota of words often turns out to be nothing more than gibberish. What then? Also, should the writer please the reader or should she be fully independent? What does it mean to be a writer, anyway? This essay is an attempt to answer these questions, but its contents are not only meant for scribblers. Within it, you’ll find some great notes about literary criticism, how we treat art , and the responsibility of the reader.

• A perfect novel ? There’s no such thing.
• The novel always reflects the inner world of the writer. That’s why we’re fascinated with writers.
• Writing is not simply about craftsmanship, but about taking your reader to the unknown lands. In the words of Christopher Hitchens: “Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.”
• Style comes from your unique personality and the perception of the world. It takes time to develop it.
• Never try to tell it all. “All” can never be put into language. Take a part of it and tell it the best you can.
• Avoid being cliché. Try to infuse new life into your writing .
• Writing is about your way of being. It’s your game. Paradoxically, if you try to please everyone, your writing will become less appealing. You’ll lose the interest of the readers. This rule doesn’t apply in the business world where you have to write for a specific person (a target audience).
• As a reader, you have responsibilities too. According to the critics, every thirty years, there’s just a handful of great novels. Maybe it’s true. But there’s also an element of personal connection between the reader and the writer. That’s why for one person a novel is a marvel, while for the other, nothing special at all. That’s why you have to search and find the author who will touch you.

5. Virginia Woolf – Death of the Moth

Amid an ordinary day, sitting in a room of her own, Virginia Woolf tells about the epic struggle for survival and the evanescence of life. This short essay is truly powerful. In the beginning, the atmosphere is happy. Life is in full force. And then, suddenly, it fades away. This sense of melancholy would mark the last years of Woolf’s life.

• The melody of language… A good sentence is like music: “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow- underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us”.
• You can show the grandest in the mundane (for example, the moth at your window and the drama of life and death).
• Using simple comparisons makes the style more lucid: “Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure”.

6. Meghan Daum – My Misspent Youth

Many of us, at some point or another, dream about living in New York. Meghan Daum’s take on the subject differs slightly from what you might expect. There’s no glamour, no Broadway shows, and no fancy restaurants. Instead, there’s the sullen reality of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. You’ll get all the juicy details about credit cards, overdue payments, and scrambling for survival. It’s a word of warning. But it’s also a great story about shattered fantasies of living in a big city. Word on the street is: “You ain’t promised mañana in the rotten manzana.”

• You can paint a picture of your former self. What did that person believe in? What kind of world did he or she live in?
• “The day that turned your life around” is a good theme you may use in a story. Memories of a special day are filled with emotions. Strong emotions often breed strong writing.
• Use cultural references and relevant slang to create a context for your story.
• You can tell all the details of the story, even if in some people’s eyes you’ll look like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived. It adds to the originality.
• Say it in a new way: “In this mindset, the dollars spent, like the mechanics of a machine no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, an intangible avenue toward self-expression, a mere vehicle of style”.
• You can mix your personal story with the zeitgeist or the ethos of the time.

7. Roger Ebert – Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Probably the greatest film critic of all time, Roger Ebert, tells us not to rage against the dying of the light. This essay is full of courage, erudition, and humanism. From it, we learn about what it means to be dying (Hitchens’ “Mortality” is another great work on that theme). But there’s so much more. It’s a great celebration of life too. It’s about not giving up, and sticking to your principles until the very end. It brings to mind the famous scene from Dead Poets Society where John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students: “Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary”.

• Start with a powerful sentence: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear.”
• Use quotes to prove your point -”‘Ask someone how they feel about death’, he said, ‘and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die’. Ask them, ‘In the next 30 seconds?’ No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen”.
• Admit the basic truths about reality in a childlike way (especially after pondering quantum physics) – “I believe my wristwatch exists, and even when I am unconscious, it is ticking all the same. You have to start somewhere”.
• Let other thinkers prove your point. Use quotes and ideas from your favorite authors and friends.

8. George Orwell – Shooting an Elephant

Even after one reading, you’ll remember this one for years. The story, set in British Burma, is about shooting an elephant (it’s not for the squeamish). It’s also the most powerful denunciation of colonialism ever put into writing. Orwell, apparently a free representative of British rule, feels to be nothing more than a puppet succumbing to the whim of the mob.

• The first sentence is the most important one: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me”.
• You can use just the first paragraph to set the stage for the whole piece of prose.
• Use beautiful language that stirs the imagination: “I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains.” Or: “I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”
• If you’ve ever been to war, you will have a story to tell: “(Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)”
• Use simple words, and admit the sad truth only you can perceive: “They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching”.
• Share words of wisdom to add texture to the writing: “I perceived at this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his freedom that he destroys.”
• I highly recommend reading everything written by Orwell, especially if you’re looking for the best essay collections on Amazon or Goodreads.

9. George Orwell – A Hanging

It’s just another day in Burma – time to hang a man. Without much ado, Orwell recounts the grim reality of taking another person’s life. A man is taken from his cage and in a few minutes, he’s going to be hanged. The most horrible thing is the normality of it. It’s a powerful story about human nature. Also, there’s an extraordinary incident with the dog, but I won’t get ahead of myself.

• Create brilliant, yet short descriptions of characters: “He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting mustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the mustache of a comic man on the films”.
• Understand and share the felt presence of a unique experience: “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man”.
• Make your readers hear the sound that will stay with them forever: “And then when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”
• Make the ending original by refusing the tendency to seek closure or summing it up.

10. Christopher Hitchens – Assassins of The Mind

In one of the greatest essays written in defense of free speech, Christopher Hitchens shares many examples of how modern media kneel to the explicit threats of violence posed by Islamic extremists. He recounts the story of his friend, Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses who, for many years, had to watch over his shoulder because of the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini. With his usual wit, Hitchens shares various examples of people who died because of their opinions and of editors who refuse to publish anything related to Islam because of fear (and it was written long before the Charlie Hebdo massacre). After reading the essay, you realize that freedom of expression is one of the most precious things we have and that we have to fight for it. I highly recommend all essay collections penned by Hitchens, especially the ones written for Vanity Fair.

• Assume that the readers will know the cultural references. When they do, their self-esteem goes up – they are a part of an insider group.
• When proving your point, give a variety of real-life examples from eclectic sources. Leave no room for ambiguity or vagueness. Research and overall knowledge are essential here.
• Use italics to emphasize a specific word or phrase (here I use the underlining): “We live now in a climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. In consequence, several things have not happened.”
• Think about how to make it sound more original: “So there is now a hidden partner in our cultural and academic and publishing and the broadcasting world: a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table.”

11. Christopher Hitchens – The New Commandments

It’s high time to shatter the tablets and amend the biblical rules of conduct. Watch, as Christopher Hitchens slays one commandment after the other on moral, as well as historical grounds. For example, did you know that there are many versions of the divine law dictated by God to Moses which you can find in the Bible? Aren’t we thus empowered to write our version of a proper moral code? If you approach it with an open mind, this essay may change the way you think about the Bible and religion.

• Take the iconoclastic approach. Have a party on the hallowed soil.
• Use humor to undermine orthodox ideas (it seems to be the best way to deal with an established authority).
• Use sarcasm and irony when appropriate (or not): “Nobody is opposed to a day of rest. The international Communist movement got its start by proclaiming a strike for an eight-hour day on May 1, 1886, against Christian employers who used child labor seven days a week”.
• Defeat God on legal grounds: “Wise lawmakers know that it is a mistake to promulgate legislation that is impossible to obey”.
• Be ruthless in the logic of your argument. Provide evidence.

12. Phillip Lopate – Against Joie de Vivre

While reading this fantastic essay, this quote from Slavoj Žižek kept coming back to me: “I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves”. I can bear the onus of happiness or joie de vivre for some time. But this force enables me to get free and wallow in the sweet feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. By reading this work of Lopate, you’ll enter into the world of an intelligent man who finds most social rituals a drag. It’s worth exploring.

• Go against the grain. Be flamboyant and controversial (if you can handle it).
• Treat the paragraph like a group of thoughts on one theme. Next paragraph, next theme.
• Use references to other artists to set the context and enrich the prose: “These sunny little canvases with their talented innocence, the third-generation spirit of Montmartre, bore testimony to a love of life so unbending as to leave an impression of rigid narrow-mindedness as extreme as any Savonarola. Their rejection of sorrow was total”.
• Capture the emotions in life that are universal, yet remain unspoken.
• Don’t be afraid to share your intimate experiences.

13. Philip Larkin – The Pleasure Principle

This piece comes from the Required Writing collection of personal essays. Larkin argues that reading in verse should be a source of intimate pleasure – not a medley of unintelligible thoughts that only the author can (or can’t?) decipher. It’s a sobering take on modern poetry and a great call to action for all those involved in it. Well worth a read.

• Write about complicated ideas (such as poetry) simply. You can change how people look at things if you express yourself enough.
• Go boldly. The reader wants a bold writer: “We seem to be producing a new kind of bad poetry, not the old kind that tries to move the reader and fails, but one that does not even try”.
• Play with words and sentence length. Create music: “It is time some of you playboys realized, says the judge, that reading a poem is hard work. Fourteen days in stir. Next case”.
• Persuade the reader to take action. Here, direct language is the most effective.

14. Sigmund Freud – Thoughts for the Times on War and Death

This essay reveals Freud’s disillusionment with the whole project of Western civilization. How the peaceful European countries could engage in a war that would eventually cost over 17 million lives? What stirs people to kill each other? Is it their nature, or are they puppets of imperial forces with agendas of their own? From the perspective of time, this work by Freud doesn’t seem to be fully accurate. Even so, it’s well worth your time.

• Commence with long words derived from Latin. Get grandiloquent, make your argument incontrovertible, and leave your audience discombobulated.
• Use unending sentences, so that the reader feels confused, yet impressed.
• Say it well: “In this way, he enjoyed the blue sea and the grey; the beauty of snow-covered mountains and green meadowlands; the magic of northern forests and the splendor of southern vegetation; the mood evoked by landscapes that recall great historical events, and the silence of untouched nature”.
• Human nature is a subject that never gets dry.

15. Zadie Smith – Some Notes on Attunement

“You are privy to a great becoming, but you recognize nothing” – Francis Dolarhyde. This one is about the elusiveness of change occurring within you. For Zadie, it was hard to attune to the vibes of Joni Mitchell – especially her Blue album. But eventually, she grew up to appreciate her genius, and all the other things changed as well. This top essay is all about the relationship between humans, and art. We shouldn’t like art because we’re supposed to. We should like it because it has an instantaneous, emotional effect on us. Although, according to Stansfield (Gary Oldman) in Léon, liking Beethoven is rather mandatory.

• Build an expectation of what’s coming: “The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all”.
• Don’t be afraid of repetition if it feels good.
• Psychedelic drugs let you appreciate things you never appreciated.
• Intertwine a personal journey with philosophical musings.
• Show rather than tell: “My friends pitied their eyes. The same look the faithful give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces”.
• Let the poets speak for you: “That time is past, / And all its aching joys are now no
• more, / And all its dizzy raptures”.
• By voicing your anxieties, you can heal the anxieties of the reader. In that way, you say: “I’m just like you. I’m your friend in this struggle”.
• Admit your flaws to make your persona more relatable.

16. Annie Dillard – Total Eclipse

My imagination was always stirred by the scene of the solar eclipse in Pharaoh, by Boleslaw Prus. I wondered about the shock of the disoriented crowd when they saw how their ruler could switch off the light. Getting immersed in this essay by Annie Dillard has a similar effect. It produces amazement and some kind of primeval fear. It’s not only the environment that changes; it’s your mind and the perception of the world. After the eclipse, nothing is going to be the same again.

• Yet again, the power of the first sentence draws you in: “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass”.
• Don’t miss the extraordinary scene. Then describe it: “Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring”.
• Use colloquial language. Write as you talk. Short sentences often win.
• Contrast the numinous with the mundane to enthrall the reader.

17. Édouard Levé – When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue

This suicidally beautiful essay will teach you a lot about the appreciation of life and the struggle with mental illness. It’s a collection of personal, apparently unrelated thoughts that show us the rich interior of the author. You look at the real-time thoughts of another person, and then recognize the same patterns within yourself… It sounds like a confession of a person who’s about to take their life, and it’s striking in its originality.

• Use the stream-of-consciousness technique and put random thoughts on paper. Then, polish them: “I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it”.
• Place the treasure deep within the story: “When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss”.
• Don’t worry about what people might think. The more you expose, the more powerful the writing. Readers also take part in the great drama. They experience universal emotions that mostly stay inside.  You can translate them into writing.

18. Gloria E. Anzaldúa – How to Tame a Wild Tongue

Anzaldúa, who was born in south Texas, had to struggle to find her true identity. She was American, but her culture was grounded in Mexico. In this way, she and her people were not fully respected in either of the countries. This essay is an account of her journey of becoming the ambassador of the Chicano (Mexican-American) culture. It’s full of anecdotes, interesting references, and different shades of Spanish. It’s a window into a new cultural dimension that you’ve never experienced before.

• If your mother tongue is not English, but you write in English, use some of your unique homeland vocabulary.
• You come from a rich cultural heritage. You can share it with people who never heard about it, and are not even looking for it, but it is of immense value to them when they discover it.
• Never forget about your identity. It is precious. It is a part of who you are. Even if you migrate, try to preserve it. Use it to your best advantage and become the voice of other people in the same situation.
• Tell them what’s really on your mind: “So if you want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language”.

19. Kurt Vonnegut – Dispatch From A Man Without a Country

In terms of style, this essay is flawless. It’s simple, conversational, humorous, and yet, full of wisdom. And when Vonnegut becomes a teacher and draws an axis of “beginning – end”, and, “good fortune – bad fortune” to explain literature, it becomes outright hilarious. It’s hard to find an author with such a down-to-earth approach. He doesn’t need to get intellectual to prove a point. And the point could be summed up by the quote from Great Expectations – “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!”

• Start with a curious question: “Do you know what a twerp is?”
• Surprise your readers with uncanny analogies: “I am from a family of artists. Here I am, making a living in the arts. It has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station.”
• Use your natural language without too many special effects. In time, the style will crystalize.
• An amusing lesson in writing from Mr. Vonnegut: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college”.
• You can put actual images or vignettes between the paragraphs to illustrate something.

20. Mary Ruefle – On Fear

Most psychologists and gurus agree that fear is the greatest enemy of success or any creative activity. It’s programmed into our minds to keep us away from imaginary harm. Mary Ruefle takes on this basic human emotion with flair. She explores fear from so many angles (especially in the world of poetry-writing) that at the end of this personal essay, you will look at it, dissect it, untangle it, and hopefully be able to say “f**k you” the next time your brain is trying to stop you.

• Research your subject thoroughly. Ask people, have interviews, get expert opinions, and gather as much information as possible. Then scavenge through the fields of data, and pull out the golden bits that will let your prose shine.
• Use powerful quotes to add color to your story: “The poet who embarks on the creation of the poem (as I know by experience), begins with the aimless sensation of a hunter about to embark on a night hunt through the remotest of forests. Unaccountable dread stirs in his heart”. – Lorca.
• Writing advice from the essay: “One of the fears a young writer has is not being able to write as well as he or she wants to, the fear of not being able to sound like X or Y, a favorite author. But out of fear, hopefully, is born a young writer’s voice”.

21. Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation

In this highly intellectual essay, Sontag fights for art and its interpretation. It’s a great lesson, especially for critics and interpreters who endlessly chew on works that simply defy interpretation. Why don’t we just leave the art alone? I always hated it when at school they asked me: “What did the author have in mind when he did X or Y?” Iēsous Pantocrator! Hell if I know! I will judge it through my subjective experience!

• Leave the art alone: “Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities”.
• When you have something really important to say, style matters less.
• There’s no use in creating a second meaning or inviting interpretation of our art. Just leave it be and let it speak for itself.

22. Nora Ephron – A Few Words About Breasts

This is a heartwarming, coming-of-age story about a young girl who waits in vain for her breasts to grow. It’s simply a humorous and pleasurable read. The size of breasts is a big deal for women. If you’re a man, you may peek into the mind of a woman and learn many interesting things. If you’re a woman, maybe you’ll be able to relate and at last, be at peace with your bosom.

• Touch an interesting subject and establish a strong connection with the readers (in that case, women with small breasts). Let your personality shine through the written piece. If you are lighthearted, show it.
• Use hyphens to create an impression of real talk: “My house was full of apples and peaches and milk and homemade chocolate chip cookies – which were nice, and good for you, but-not-right-before-dinner-or-you’ll-spoil-your-appetite.”
• Use present tense when you tell a story to add more life to it.
• Share the pronounced, memorable traits of characters: “A previous girlfriend named Solange, who was famous throughout Beverly Hills High School for having no pigment in her right eyebrow, had knitted them for him (angora dice)”.

23. Carl Sagan – Does Truth Matter – Science, Pseudoscience, and Civilization

Carl Sagan was one of the greatest proponents of skepticism, and an author of numerous books, including one of my all-time favorites – The Demon-Haunted World . He was also a renowned physicist and the host of the fantastic Cosmos: A Personal Voyage series, which inspired a whole generation to uncover the mysteries of the cosmos. He was also a dedicated weed smoker – clearly ahead of his time. The essay that you’re about to read is a crystallization of his views about true science, and why you should check the evidence before believing in UFOs or similar sorts of crap.

• Tell people the brutal truth they need to hear. Be the one who spells it out for them.
• Give a multitude of examples to prove your point. Giving hard facts helps to establish trust with the readers and show the veracity of your arguments.
• Recommend a good book that will change your reader’s minds – How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

24. Paul Graham – How To Do What You Love

How To Do What You Love should be read by every college student and young adult. The Internet is flooded with a large number of articles and videos that are supposed to tell you what to do with your life. Most of them are worthless, but this one is different. It’s sincere, and there’s no hidden agenda behind it. There’s so much we take for granted – what we study, where we work, what we do in our free time… Surely we have another two hundred years to figure it out, right? Life’s too short to be so naïve. Please, read the essay and let it help you gain fulfillment from your work.

• Ask simple, yet thought-provoking questions (especially at the beginning of the paragraph) to engage the reader: “How much are you supposed to like what you do?”
• Let the readers question their basic assumptions: “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like”.
• If you’re writing for a younger audience, you can act as a mentor. It’s beneficial for younger people to read a few words of advice from a person with experience.

25. John Jeremiah Sullivan – Mister Lytle

A young, aspiring writer is about to become a nurse of a fading writer – Mister Lytle (Andrew Nelson Lytle), and there will be trouble. This essay by Sullivan is probably my favorite one from the whole list. The amount of beautiful sentences it contains is just overwhelming. But that’s just a part of its charm. It also takes you to the Old South which has an incredible atmosphere. It’s grim and tawny but you want to stay there for a while.

• Short, distinct sentences are often the most powerful ones: “He had a deathbed, in other words. He didn’t go suddenly”.
• Stay consistent with the mood of the story. When reading Mister Lytle you are immersed in that southern, forsaken, gloomy world, and it’s a pleasure.
• The spectacular language that captures it all: “His French was superb, but his accent in English was best—that extinct mid-Southern, land-grant pioneer speech, with its tinges of the abandoned Celtic urban Northeast (“boned” for burned) and its raw gentility”.
• This essay is just too good. You have to read it.

26. Joan Didion – On Self Respect

Normally, with that title, you would expect some straightforward advice about how to improve your character and get on with your goddamn life – but not from Joan Didion. From the very beginning, you can feel the depth of her thinking, and the unmistakable style of a true woman who’s been hurt. You can learn more from this essay than from whole books about self-improvement . It reminds me of the scene from True Detective, where Frank Semyon tells Ray Velcoro to “own it” after he realizes he killed the wrong man all these years ago. I guess we all have to “own it”, recognize our mistakes, and move forward sometimes.

• Share your moral advice: “Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs”.
• It’s worth exploring the subject further from a different angle. It doesn’t matter how many people have already written on self-respect or self-reliance – you can still write passionately about it.
• Whatever happens, you must take responsibility for it. Brave the storms of discontent.

27. Susan Sontag – Notes on Camp

I’ve never read anything so thorough and lucid about an artistic current. After reading this essay, you will know what camp is. But not only that – you will learn about so many artists you’ve never heard of. You will follow their traces and go to places where you’ve never been before. You will vastly increase your appreciation of art. It’s interesting how something written as a list could be so amazing. All the listicles we usually see on the web simply cannot compare with it.

• Talking about artistic sensibilities is a tough job. When you read the essay, you will see how much research, thought and raw intellect came into it. But that’s one of the reasons why people still read it today, even though it was written in 1964.
• You can choose an unorthodox way of expression in the medium for which you produce. For example, Notes on Camp is a listicle – one of the most popular content formats on the web. But in the olden days, it was uncommon to see it in print form.
• Just think about what is camp: “And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling”.

28. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Self-Reliance

That’s the oldest one from the lot. Written in 1841, it still inspires generations of people. It will let you understand what it means to be self-made. It contains some of the most memorable quotes of all time. I don’t know why, but this one especially touched me: “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design, and posterity seems to follow his steps as a train of clients”. Now isn’t it purely individualistic, American thought? Emerson told me (and he will tell you) to do something amazing with my life. The language it contains is a bit archaic, but that just adds to the weight of the argument. You can consider it to be a meeting with a great philosopher who shaped the ethos of the modern United States.

• You can start with a powerful poem that will set the stage for your work.
• Be free in your creative flow. Do not wait for the approval of others: “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness”.
• Use rhetorical questions to strengthen your argument: “I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly say a new and spontaneous word?”

29. David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster

When you want simple field notes about a food festival, you needn’t send there the formidable David Foster Wallace. He sees right through the hypocrisy and cruelty behind killing hundreds of thousands of innocent lobsters – by boiling them alive. This essay uncovers some of the worst traits of modern American people. There are no apologies or hedging one’s bets. There’s just plain truth that stabs you in the eye like a lobster claw. After reading this essay, you may reconsider the whole animal-eating business.

• When it’s important, say it plainly and stagger the reader: “[Lobsters] survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point”.
• In your writing, put exact quotes of the people you’ve been interviewing (including slang and grammatical errors). It makes it more vivid, and interesting.
• You can use humor in serious situations to make your story grotesque.
• Use captions to expound on interesting points of your essay.

30. David Foster Wallace – The Nature of the Fun

The famous novelist and author of the most powerful commencement speech ever done is going to tell you about the joys and sorrows of writing a work of fiction. It’s like taking care of a mutant child that constantly oozes smelly liquids. But you love that child and you want others to love it too. It’s a very humorous account of what it means to be an author. If you ever plan to write a novel, you should read that one. And the story about the Chinese farmer is just priceless.

• Base your point on a chimerical analogy. Here, the writer’s unfinished work is a “hideously damaged infant”.
• Even in expository writing, you may share an interesting story to keep things lively.
• Share your true emotions (even when you think they won’t interest anyone). Often, that’s exactly what will interest the reader.
• Read the whole essay for marvelous advice on writing fiction.

31. Margaret Atwood – Attitude

This is not an essay per se, but I included it on the list for the sake of variety. It was delivered as a commencement speech at The University of Toronto, and it’s about keeping the right attitude. Soon after leaving university, most graduates have to forget about safety, parties, and travel and start a new life – one filled with a painful routine that will last until they drop. Atwood says that you don’t have to accept that. You can choose how you react to everything that happens to you (and you don’t have to stay in that dead-end job for the rest of your days).

• At times, we are all too eager to persuade, but the strongest persuasion is not forceful. It’s subtle. It speaks to the heart. It affects you gradually.
• You may be tempted to talk about a subject by first stating what it is not, rather than what it is. Try to avoid that.
• Simple advice for writers (and life in general): “When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice. You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it”.

32. Jo Ann Beard – The Fourth State of Matter

Read that one as soon as possible. It’s one of the most masterful and impactful essays you’ll ever read. It’s like a good horror – a slow build-up, and then your jaw drops to the ground. To summarize the story would be to spoil it, so I recommend that you just dig in and devour this essay in one sitting. It’s a perfect example of “show, don’t tell” writing, where the actions of characters are enough to create the right effect. No need for flowery adjectives here.

• The best story you will tell is going to come from your personal experience.
• Use mysteries that will nag the reader. For example, at the beginning of the essay, we learn about the “vanished husband” but there’s no explanation. We have to keep reading to get the answer.
• Explain it in simple terms: “You’ve got your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma”. Why complicate?

33. Terence McKenna – Tryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness

To me, Terence McKenna was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. His many lectures (now available on YouTube) attracted millions of people who suspect that consciousness holds secrets yet to be unveiled. McKenna consumed psychedelic drugs for most of his life and it shows (in a positive way). Many people consider him a looney, and a hippie, but he was so much more than that. He dared to go into the abyss of his psyche and come back to tell the tale. He also wrote many books (the most famous being Food Of The Gods ), built a huge botanical garden in Hawaii , lived with shamans, and was a connoisseur of all things enigmatic and obscure. Take a look at this essay, and learn more about the explorations of the subconscious mind.

• Become the original thinker, but remember that it may require extraordinary measures: “I call myself an explorer rather than a scientist because the area that I’m looking at contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a science”.
• Learn new words every day to make your thoughts lucid.
• Come up with the most outlandish ideas to push the envelope of what’s possible. Don’t take things for granted or become intellectually lazy. Question everything.

34. Eudora Welty – The Little Store

By reading this little-known essay, you will be transported into the world of the old American South. It’s a remembrance of trips to the little store in a little town. It’s warm and straightforward, and when you read it, you feel like a child once more. All these beautiful memories live inside of us. They lay somewhere deep in our minds, hidden from sight. The work by Eudora Welty is an attempt to uncover some of them and let you get reacquainted with some smells and tastes of the past.

• When you’re from the South, flaunt it. It’s still good old English but sometimes it sounds so foreign. I can hear the Southern accent too: “There were almost tangible smells – licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet Croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice”.
• Yet again, never forget your roots.
• Childhood stories can be the most powerful ones. You can write about how they shaped you.

35. John McPhee – The Search for Marvin Gardens

The Search for Marvin Gardens contains many layers of meaning. It’s a story about a Monopoly championship, but also, it’s the author’s search for the lost streets visible on the board of the famous board game. It also presents a historical perspective on the rise and fall of civilizations, and on Atlantic City, which once was a lively place, and then, slowly declined, the streets filled with dirt and broken windows.

• There’s nothing like irony: “A sign- ‘Slow, Children at Play’- has been bent backward by an automobile”.
• Telling the story in apparently unrelated fragments is sometimes better than telling the whole thing in a logical order.
• Creativity is everything. The best writing may come just from connecting two ideas and mixing them to achieve a great effect. Shush! The muse is whispering.

36. Maxine Hong Kingston – No Name Woman

A dead body at the bottom of the well makes for a beautiful literary device. The first line of Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name Is Red delivers it perfectly: “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well”. There’s something creepy about the idea of the well. Just think about the “It puts the lotion in the basket” scene from The Silence of the Lambs. In the first paragraph of Kingston’s essay, we learn about a suicide committed by uncommon means of jumping into the well. But this time it’s a real story. Who was this woman? Why did she do it? Read the essay.

• Mysterious death always gets attention. The macabre details are like daiquiris on a hot day – you savor them – you don’t let them spill.
• One sentence can speak volumes: “But the rare urge west had fixed upon our family, and so my aunt crossed boundaries not delineated in space”.
• It’s interesting to write about cultural differences – especially if you have the relevant experience. Something normal for us is unthinkable for others. Show this different world.
• The subject of sex is never boring.

37. Joan Didion – On Keeping A Notebook

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is one of the most famous collections of essays of all time. In it, you will find a curious piece called On Keeping A Notebook. It’s not only a meditation about keeping a journal. It’s also Didion’s reconciliation with her past self. After reading it, you will seriously reconsider your life’s choices and look at your life from a wider perspective.

• When you write things down in your journal, be more specific – unless you want to write a deep essay about it years later.
• Use the beauty of the language to relate to the past: “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing ‘How High the Moon’ on the car radio”.
• Drop some brand names if you want to feel posh.

38. Joan Didion – Goodbye To All That

This one touched me because I also lived in New York City for a while. I don’t know why, but stories about life in NYC are so often full of charm and this eerie-melancholy-jazz feeling. They are powerful. They go like this: “There was a hard blizzard in NYC. As the sound of sirens faded, Tony descended into the dark world of hustlers and pimps.” That’s pulp literature but in the context of NYC, it always sounds cool. Anyway, this essay is amazing in too many ways. You just have to read it.

• Talk about New York City. They will read it.
• Talk about the human experience: “It did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?”
• Look back at your life and reexamine it. Draw lessons from it.

39. George Orwell – Reflections on Gandhi

George Orwell could see things as they were. No exaggeration, no romanticism – just facts. He recognized totalitarianism and communism for what they were and shared his worries through books like 1984 and Animal Farm . He took the same sober approach when dealing with saints and sages. Today, we regard Gandhi as one of the greatest political leaders of the twentieth century – and rightfully so. But did you know that when asked about the Jews during World War II, Gandhi said that they should commit collective suicide and that it: “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.” He also recommended utter pacifism in 1942, during the Japanese invasion, even though he knew it would cost millions of lives. But overall he was a good guy. Read the essay and broaden your perspective on the Bapu of the Indian Nation.

• Share a philosophical thought that stops the reader for a moment: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid”.
• Be straightforward in your writing – no mannerisms, no attempts to create ‘style’, and no invocations of the numinous – unless you feel the mystical vibe.

40. George Orwell – Politics and the English Language

Let Mr. Orwell give you some writing tips. Written in 1946, this essay is still one of the most helpful documents on writing in English. Orwell was probably the first person who exposed the deliberate vagueness of political language. He was very serious about it and I admire his efforts to slay all unclear sentences (including ones written by distinguished professors). But it’s good to make it humorous too from time to time. My favorite examples of that would be the immortal Soft Language sketch by George Carlin or the “Romans Go Home” scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Overall, it’s a great essay filled with examples from many written materials. It’s a must-read for any writer.

• Listen to the master: “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose.” Do something about it.
• This essay is all about writing better, so go to the source if you want the goodies.

Other Essays You May Find Interesting

The list that I’ve prepared is by no means complete. The literary world is full of exciting essays and you’ll never know which one is going to change your life. I’ve found reading essays very rewarding because sometimes, a single one means more than reading a whole book. It’s almost like wandering around and peeking into the minds of the greatest writers and thinkers that ever lived. To make this list more comprehensive, below I included more essays you may find interesting.

Oliver Sacks – On Libraries

One of the greatest contributors to the knowledge about the human mind, Oliver Sacks meditates on the value of libraries and his love of books.

Noam Chomsky – The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Chomsky did probably more than anyone else to define the role of the intelligentsia in the modern world . There is a war of ideas over there – good and bad – intellectuals are going to be those who ought to be fighting for the former.

Sam Harris – The Riddle of The Gun

Sam Harris, now a famous philosopher and neuroscientist, takes on the problem of gun control in the United States. His thoughts are clear of prejudice. After reading this, you’ll appreciate the value of logical discourse overheated, irrational debate that more often than not has real implications on policy.

Tim Ferriss – Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide

This piece was written as a blog post , but it’s worth your time. The author of the NYT bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek shares an emotional story about how he almost killed himself, and what can you do to save yourself or your friends from suicide.

Edward Said – Reflections on Exile

The life of Edward Said was a truly fascinating one. Born in Jerusalem, he lived between Palestine and Egypt and finally settled down in the United States, where he completed his most famous work – Orientalism. In this essay, he shares his thoughts about what it means to be in exile.

Richard Feynman – It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…

Richard Feynman is one of the most interesting minds of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant physicist, but also an undeniably great communicator of science, an artist, and a traveler. By reading this essay, you can observe his thought process when he tries to figure out what affects our perception of time. It’s a truly fascinating read.

Rabindranath Tagore – The Religion of The Forest

I like to think about Tagore as my spiritual Friend. His poems are just marvelous. They are like some of the Persian verses that praise love, nature, and the unity of all things. By reading this short essay, you will learn a lot about Indian philosophy and its relation to its Western counterpart.

Richard Dawkins – Letter To His 10-Year-Old Daughter

Every father should be able to articulate his philosophy of life to his children. With this letter that’s similar to what you find in the Paris Review essays , the famed atheist and defender of reason, Richard Dawkins, does exactly that. It’s beautifully written and stresses the importance of looking at evidence when we’re trying to make sense of the world.

Albert Camus – The Minotaur (or, The Stop In Oran)

Each person requires a period of solitude – a period when one’s able to gather thoughts and make sense of life. There are many places where you may attempt to find quietude. Albert Camus tells about his favorite one.

Koty Neelis – 21 Incredible Life Lessons From Anthony Bourdain

I included it as the last one because it’s not really an essay, but I just had to put it somewhere. In this listicle, you’ll find the 21 most original thoughts of the high-profile cook, writer, and TV host, Anthony Bourdain. Some of them are shocking, others are funny, but they’re all worth checking out.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca – On the Shortness of Life

It’s similar to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam because it praises life. Seneca shares some of his stoic philosophy and tells you not to waste your time on stupidities. Drink! – for once dead you shall never return.

Bertrand Russell – In Praise of Idleness

This old essay is a must-read for modern humans. We are so preoccupied with our work, our phones, and all the media input we drown in our business. Bertrand Russell tells you to chill out a bit – maybe it will do you some good.

James Baldwin – Stranger in the Village

It’s an essay on the author’s experiences as an African-American in a Swiss village, exploring race, identity, and alienation while highlighting the complexities of racial dynamics and the quest for belonging.

Bonus – More writing tips from two great books

The mission to improve my writing skills took me further than just going through the essays. I’ve come across some great books on writing too. I highly recommend you read them in their entirety. They’re written beautifully and contain lots of useful knowledge. Below you’ll find random (but useful) notes that I took from The Sense of Style and On Writing.

The Sense of Style – By Steven Pinker

• Style manuals are full of inconsistencies. Following their advice might not be the best idea. They might make your prose boring.
• Grammarians from all eras condemn students for not knowing grammar. But it just evolves. It cannot be rigid.
• “Nothing worth learning can be taught” – Oscar Wilde. It’s hard to learn to write from a manual – you have to read, write, and analyze.
• Good writing makes you imagine things and feel them for yourself – use word pictures.
• Don’t fear using voluptuous words.
• Phonesthetics – or how the words sound.
• Use parallel language (consistency of tense).
• Good writing finishes strong.
• Write to someone. Never write for no one in mind. Try to show people your view of the world.
• Don’t tell everything you are going to say in summary (signposting) – be logical, but be conversational.
• Don’t be pompous.
• Don’t use quotation marks where they don’t “belong”. Be confident about your style.
• Don’t hedge your claims (research first, and then tell it like it is).
• Avoid clichés and meta-concepts (concepts about concepts). Be more straightforward!
• Not prevention – but prevents or prevented – don’t use dead nouns.
• Be more vivid while using your mother tongue – don’t use passive where it’s not needed. Direct the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
• The curse of knowledge – the reader doesn’t know what you know – beware of that.
• Explain technical terms.
• Use examples when you explain a difficult term.
• If you ever say “I think I understand this” it probably means you don’t.
• It’s better to underestimate the lingo of your readers than to overestimate it.
• Functional fixedness – if we know some object (or idea) well, we tend to see it in terms of usage, not just as an object.
• Use concrete language instead of an abstraction.
• Show your work to people before you publish (get feedback!).
• Wait for a few days and then revise, revise, revise. Think about clarity and the sound of sentences. Then show it to someone. Then revise one more time. Then publish (if it’s to be serious work).
• Look at it from the perspective of other people.
• Omit needless words.
• Put the heaviest words at the end of the sentence.
• It’s good to use the passive, but only when appropriate.
• Check all text for cohesion. Make sure that the sentences flow gently.
• In expository work, go from general to more specific. But in journalism start from the big news and then give more details.
• Use the paragraph break to give the reader a moment to take a breath.
• Use the verb instead of a noun (make it more active) – not “cancellation”, but “canceled”. But after you introduce the action, you can refer to it with a noun.
• Avoid too many negations.
• If you write about why something is so, don’t spend too much time writing about why it is not.

On Writing Well – By William Zinsser

• Writing is a craft. You need to sit down every day and practice your craft.
• You should re-write and polish your prose a lot.
• Throw out all the clutter. Don’t keep it because you like it. Aim for readability.
• Look at the best examples of English literature . There’s hardly any needless garbage there.
• Use shorter expressions. Don’t add extra words that don’t bring any value to your work.
• Don’t use pompous language. Use simple language and say plainly what’s going on (“because” equals “because”).
• The media and politics are full of cluttered prose (because it helps them to cover up for their mistakes).
• You can’t add style to your work (and especially, don’t add fancy words to create an illusion of style). That will look fake. You need to develop a style.
• Write in the “I” mode. Write to a friend or just for yourself. Show your personality. There is a person behind the writing.
• Choose your words carefully. Use the dictionary to learn different shades of meaning.
• Remember about phonology. Make music with words .
• The lead is essential. Pull the reader in. Otherwise, your article is dead.
• You don’t have to make the final judgment on any topic. Just pick the right angle.
• Do your research. Not just obvious research, but a deep one.
• When it’s time to stop, stop. And finish strong. Think about the last sentence. Surprise them.
• Use quotations. Ask people. Get them talking.
• If you write about travel, it must be significant to the reader. Don’t bother with the obvious. Choose your words with special care. Avoid travel clichés at all costs. Don’t tell that the sand was white and there were rocks on the beach. Look for the right detail.
• If you want to learn how to write about art, travel, science, etc. – read the best examples available. Learn from the masters.
• Concentrate on one big idea (“Let’s not go peeing down both legs”).
• “The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good.”
• One very helpful question: “What is the piece really about?” (Not just “What the piece is about?”)

Now immerse yourself in the world of essays

By reading the essays from the list above, you’ll become a better writer , a better reader, but also a better person. An essay is a special form of writing. It is the only literary form that I know of that is an absolute requirement for career or educational advancement. Nowadays, you can use an AI essay writer or an AI essay generator that will get the writing done for you, but if you have personal integrity and strong moral principles, avoid doing this at all costs. For me as a writer, the effect of these authors’ masterpieces is often deeply personal. You won’t be able to find the beautiful thoughts they contain in any other literary form. I hope you enjoy the read and that it will inspire you to do your writing. This list is only an attempt to share some of the best essays available online. Next up, you may want to check the list of magazines and websites that accept personal essays .

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LeBron James’s: Biography of a Famous Basketball Player Essay

Basketball has always been one of the most favorite games of Americans. The National Basketball Association (NBA), which includes a variety of teams representing every US state, annually unites all fans around the country and the whole world. However, among the existing teams and famous players, there are the ones who stand out from the crowd and attract people’s attention even if these people are not fond of sports. A prime example of such a basketball player is LeBron James. Today, this name is familiar for almost every person around the world, as James repeatedly appeared in many advertisements such as Nike and Coca-Coca. He also starred in such movies as Space Jam and Trainwreck , and he is now famous for producing a number of motion pictures that the audience will see in the next few years.

However, while people hear his name for a number of reasons, LeBron James became famous for his expertise in the game of basketball. While living in Cleveland for the past five years, I have realized how proud people are to say that they come from the state of Ohio because James was born here. LeBron James comes from the beautiful city of Akron, Ohio, where he was born on December 30, 1984 (“LeBron James”). His childhood was not easy, as he was raised in a single-parent family with no financial stability. However, the amount of love and support his mother gave him was enough for LeBron to become good at sports at a young age.

After graduating from high school, James decided to pursue a career as a professional basketball player. In 2003, LeBron James joined Cleveland Cavaliers and became the most successful player in the team’s history. Of course, in the beginning, LeBron James was not considered as a full-scale competitor for such basketball stars as Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. However, over time, James’s rapid progress made him even more famous than his older colleagues. James decided to switch teams in 2010, leaving Cleveland Cavaliers and joining Miami Heat. Although Cleveland Cavaliers did not become NBA champions during the 2003-2010 period, everyone was extremely upset about James’s decision because he was one of the most promising All-Stars players at the time.

When playing for Miami Heat, LeBron James helped his team become an NBA champion two seasons in a row. After such a success, he decided to come back to his motherland and play for Cleveland Cavaliers for four more years, from 2014 to 2018. As a result, the team won the NBA championship in 2016. When James left the team for the second time, everyone was once again upset with his life choices. At the time, James decided to take the offer that would be better for his career and joined the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the most successful NBA teams in history (“LeBron James”). Last year, he won an NBA championship with the team, and today he continues to be a part of the Lakers.

At the moment, LeBron James is thirty-six years old, and there are many rumors about his future and his career. Some people think that he is already too old to play basketball and it is high time for him to retire. Others, however, are sure that he is in perfect shape to continue playing basketball for a few more years. While it is unclear, the only certain thing about LeBron James is the fact that he is one of the most successful sportsmen in the US and world history, and people from all around the globe should look up to him.

For a person like me who is not fond of sports and basketball, in particular, the name of LeBron James is closely associated with this sport, as it is hard to find a person in Cleveland who would not be able to say at least a few words about this man. He is not only a successful sportsman but a famous businessman and philanthropist. This man should be admired not only for his achievements in basketball but for his desire to use his fame for good intentions. Millions of his fans worldwide are inspired by LeBron James, who encourages people to donate money for charity and support low-income families. Moreover, although LeBron is currently the highest-paid athlete after Cristiano Ronaldo, he still remembers his childhood and how sports helped him become the person he is today. For this reason, every year, LeBron James organizes a summer camp for teenage basketball players to improve their skills and encourage them to pursue this career.

To sum up, I would like to say that LeBron James is now undoubtedly one of the most famous people on the planet. It is fascinating because he is a basketball player who is known by people who have never seen a basketball game in their life. Throughout his successful career, James has achieved a lot for himself, for his country, and for his teammates. Thus, no matter what team he currently plays for, Cleveland residents will always be proud of the fact that LeBron James comes from their state.

“LeBron James.” Biography , 2021. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, February 19). LeBron James’s: Biography of a Famous Basketball Player. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lebron-jamess-biography-of-a-famous-basketball-player/

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IvyPanda . 2024. "LeBron James’s: Biography of a Famous Basketball Player." February 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lebron-jamess-biography-of-a-famous-basketball-player/.

1. IvyPanda . "LeBron James’s: Biography of a Famous Basketball Player." February 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lebron-jamess-biography-of-a-famous-basketball-player/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "LeBron James’s: Biography of a Famous Basketball Player." February 19, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/lebron-jamess-biography-of-a-famous-basketball-player/.

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Essay on My Favourite Sport: Samples in 100 Words and 200 Words

• Updated on  
• Oct 17, 2023

Sports is a physical activity which is considered good for both mental and physical health. It has the unique ability to attract the attention of the audience. In sports, people display their strength and skills by competing with the other person either for serious competition or for entertainment . The personality of a sportsperson can be understood by the type of sport he/she plays. All the sports are categorised into two types; indoor and outdoor. In this blog, we will provide you with some sample essay on my favourite sports , so that you can get an idea about how you can frame your essay for school or essay writing competition. Stay tuned and continue reading this article!

This Blog Includes:

My favourite sport essay 100 words, essay on my favourite 250 words, essay on my favourite sport badminton.

Also Read: Online Games Good or Bad Speech

I am a great fan of basketball. I used to practice this game since I was in class 5th. My parents and my coach encouraged me a lot to perform well in my favourite sport. I believe that it is a game that combines strategy, athleticism, and teamwork . The best thing I like about this sport is the dribbling of the basketball. I love playing basketball with my friends at the society’s basketball court.

We used to gather every evening at 6:30 and play a match regularly to maintain the stamina and the pace of precision shooting. The winning situation in this game is completely dependent on teamwork, the result could be truly magical. Basketball is the sport that keeps me captivated with its adrenaline-pumping excitement. 

Also Read: Game Designing

My favourite sport is everyone’s favourite. Yes, Cricket it is. Cricket is often known as the ‘ Gentleman’s Game .’ Almost every Indian loves cricket for us this sport is not just a game it is an emotion. The entire Nation keeps a keen eye on the World Cup match when our country is performing. 

My idol is Hon’ble Sachin Tendulkar and MS Dhoni. In my childhood, I tried to copy their style and always wished to be a good cricket player. As it is rightly said ‘Practice makes a Man Perfect.’ I also believed in it and practised with my school cricket team to become a good cricket player. My endurance and dedication helped me to secure the position of opening batsman for the school cricket team and we are presenting our school at the district-level cricket competition.

The main reason cricket resonates with me is its rich history and traditions. It’s a sport that has been played for centuries, and it carries with it a sense of timelessness. The iconic venues, the legends of the game, and the celebrated rivalries all contribute to the sport’s allure. Whether it’s the Ashes battles between England and Australia or the fervent India-Pakistan contests, cricket has a way of gripping the hearts and minds of fans around the world.

Cricket not only teaches sportsmanship but also helps us learn about teamwork, patience, dedication, etc. My dream is to build a successful cricket career. To accomplish my goals I am planning to take admission in the cricket academy and learn from experts.

In conclusion, cricket is more than a sport to me; it’s a culture, a passion, and a source of endless joy in my life. Its rich heritage, technical intricacies, and life lessons will forever held close to my heart. 

Also Read: How to become a cricketer?

Among all the indoor and outdoor activities, I love to play badminton the most. Badminton is played as an indoor and outdoor game but traditionally it was an indoor game. It is one of the most admired sports among children and adults. Badminton is my favourite sport because it requires speed, practice, precision, stamina, and accuracy all at the same time.

A player needs to be very attentive while playing badminton. When each stroke of the shuttle makes a ‘whoosh’ sound, it infuses a feeling of competitiveness and enthusiasm to perform extraordinarily against the opponent.

I am a huge admirer of Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu. Watching them perform makes me feel so proud and more inclined towards the sport. It’s my dream to play a badminton tournament at the National level and win for the country.

Also Read: Adventure Sports

Related Articles:

My favourite sport is cricket. It is the most popular sport of all. Every person loves to watch cricket matches, especially the T20 and the World Cup. My favourite players are Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers.

Badminton is a dynamic racket sport which is popular worldwide. This sport is categorized as an indoor sport owing to its sensitivity to weather. It involves hitting the shuttlecock with quick reflexes using a racket. This game is played between two players and is known for its agility, precision, practice, and attentiveness. 

The most popular sports are cricket, football, badminton, table tennis, and hockey.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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7 Famous Athletes With an Interesting Biography for Your Essay

Alan Draper

When it comes to athletes the stories of which can be used as the basis for essay topics, it can be hard to choose a good one. After all, there are plenty of inspirational sports people and, as a counterpoint, less than inspirational sports personalities. While all the athletes have their ups and downs both on and off the field, you can find a famous sports person that is right for your essay. So, when you get ready to research your essays online, take a moment and consider the following picks. They all have something that sets them apart from others in the athletic world as well as an interesting back-story.

Usain Bolt is probably the most famous runner that has ever lived. Known to most as the fastest man alive, he’s broken the world record more than once during his athletic career. Born in Jamaica in 1986, he went to the Olympics for the first time in 2008. During that inaugural visit, he managed to win three medals. His career hasn’t stopped there, nor has it slowed (Get the pun?). This man is certainly inspirational, being a right choice for your essay. Whether you buy essays or write them, choosing Usain Bolt for a topic creation is perfect.

Perhaps the best-known soccer (or football) player in the world, Pele stands head and shoulders above the rest. Though not as romanticized as David Beckham, Pele stands out as a person who is driven by the game. And it’s a game that he’s done very well playing:  Over the course of 1,363 games, he managed to score an astounding 1,281 goals. In fact, he is widely considered to be the player of the century for the 1900s. Native to Brazil, a country famous for its soccer players, Pele’s life is the one worth writing about.

Muhammad Ali

Almost everyone has heard of Muhammad Ali at one point or another. Aside from Rocky Balboa, he’s the most famous boxer that has ever lived (And he has the upper hand of being real, compared to Rocky). But did you know that the impact he had on the world went much farther than just inside of the ring? Muhammad Ali was well-known for taking strong stances against things that he did not approve as well as standing up for what he believed in. Whether it was refusing to participate in the draft or pushing for more rights for African Americans, he stood firm.

Caitlyn Jenner

Of course, you’re not going to find any sports records listed under this name. However, if you look for Bruce Jenner, you’ll find plenty of them. Before her transition to a woman (and a marriage into the Kardashian family), Caitlyn was a famous Olympic athlete. However, as impressive as the athletics were, it’s the private life that essays should focus on (Got caught up researching these crazy stories online? You can visit Edubirdie and buy essay help). Jenner has a connection to quite a few major news stories:  The murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and the subsequent trial of O.J. Simpson, the rise of the Kardashians and much more. A better topic you couldn’t buy.

Tiger Woods

Even if you’re not a big golf fan, you likely know the name Tiger Woods. He’s the man who is connected to sports for most of the current generation’s lifetime. Starting up as an up-and-coming superstar, he was widely looked on as a role model and a good example. However, the downward spiral of adultery and other scandals became a black mark on his long and prosperous career. In the end, he was able to pull himself back out of the gutter and into the role that he once occupied before:  Best golfer in the world.

Jesse Owens

Many people reading this won’t have been alive to see Jesse Owens compete. However, they likely know about him as an athlete that broke the color barrier, won the gold, and stood up to Hitler himself while in Nazi Germany. This is a person who is frequently in history books for all that he managed to do in his lifetime with the assistance of his sport (Want to spend more time learning about Jesse Owens? Google “buy essay cheap” and free up some time to do it). There is no better “classic” athlete than this man.

Now we move on to another famous soccer (or football) player in the world. This time, it’s a female player. Many little girls and boys have looked up to Mia Hamm for her amazing soccer abilities making her a well-respected athlete. She fought her way up the ladder, managing to break through the glass ceiling. If you feel as though most of these essays target only men, then this is a perfect choice.

There are many athletes out there that you could write your essay about. Finding just one that fits can be a hassle. This list, full of athletes with various extraordinary and colorful histories, makes it easier to narrow the choice down.

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March Madness: Five Teams to Avoid in Your Men’s NCAA Tournament Bracket

• Author: Kevin Sweeney

In this story:

Welcome back to this year’s men’s NCAA tournament danger rankings! After a chaotic regular season that featured upsets galore, it seems inevitable that we’ll have plenty of surprises at the top of the bracket throughout the tournament. Last year’s rankings did correctly identify three first-weekend exits among the top-four seeds, including the Purdue Boilermakers, which famously lost to the Fairleigh Dickinson Knights in the first round.

Here’s a look at the teams that might be facing early exits from the Big Dance this time around.

[ March Madness 2024: News & Analysis | Schedule | Bracket ]

North Carolina Tar Heels (No. 1 seed, West Region)

Five of the last six tournaments have featured at least one No. 1 seed failing to reach the second weekend. There’s not an easy target in this year’s top seed group, but North Carolina feels the most vulnerable. The Heels come in at ninth on KenPom, and the efficiency margin gap between the Heels and third-ranked No. 1 seed Purdue is essentially equal to the margin between the Tar Heels and the No. 9 seed Michigan State Spartans, a potential second-round foe for Hubert Davis’s team.

North Carolina has exceeded its talent level this season thanks to smart role allocation, togetherness and star power at the top in RJ Davis. But continuing that in March won’t be easy. Second-round matchups against the Mississippi State Bulldogs (which sport three wins over teams above the Heels on KenPom this season) or Michigan State (a preseason top-five team) could trip up the Heels.

Davis has led the Tar Heels this season, but challenges are looming in the NCAA men’s tournament.

Amber Searls/USA TODAY Sports

Marquette Golden Eagles (No. 2 seed, South Region)

Marquette went home in the second round of last year’s tournament, upset by Michigan State to end a dream season. Could the same fate be looming this year? It’s a difficult path out of the first weekend for Shaka Smart’s team, and Golden Eagles star guard Tyler Kolek is still nursing an oblique injury that could slow down one of the nation’s best point guards.

Opening-round matchup Western Kentucky won’t be easy. The Hilltoppers are the champions of Conference USA, a league in which the automatic qualifier has won a game in the Dance in five of the last seven tournaments. WKU has a dynamic guard in Don McHenry and veterans from power conference programs on the wings and up front. Assuming Marquette survives that, a tricky second-round meeting with the Florida Gators, Colorado Buffaloes or Boise State Broncos looms. Florida has been a trendy pick to make a deep run thanks to the Gators’ overwhelming size and veteran guards while Colorado and Boise State are each top-40 KenPom teams that have entered March very hot. This is a tough draw.

March Madness Brackets: Expert Predictions for the 2024 Men’s NCAA Tournament

Iowa state cyclones (no. 2 seed, east region).

The Cyclones will be a trendy pick to reach at least the Elite Eight, coming into the tournament off the team’s best performance of the season in a blowout win over the Houston Cougars. But the Cyclones’ flaws still make them a vulnerable team should they have a poor offensive performance at the wrong time. Iowa State ranks No. 55 in offensive efficiency per KenPom, the second-worst mark among top-four seeds ahead of only the Kansas Jayhawks. Iowa State is just 7–5 this season when it shoots under 30% from beyond the arc, and both potential second-round foes—Washington State Cougars and Drake Bulldogs—are good at defending the arc. Plus, Iowa State relies heavily on forcing turnovers to key its elite defense, and both Wazzu and Drake have been very solid at taking care of the ball this season.

Plus, we’ve already seen some brutal offensive displays from T.J. Otzelberger’s Iowa State teams in previous seasons. They mustered just 56 points in the Sweet 16 against Miami in 2022, then just 41 against the Pittsburgh Panthers in the Round of 64 a year ago. This is by far the Cyclones’ best team yet under Otzelberger, but all it takes is one terrible night from the floor to leave Iowa State vulnerable.

March Madness: Forty Things to Watch in the 2024 NCAA Men’s Tournament

Baylor bears (no. 3 seed, west region).

Baylor won it all in 2021 but has made first-weekend exits in each of the past two seasons. Is a third in store this time around? The Bears have shown some more grit on the defensive end lately after struggling mightily early in the season but still rate well outside the top 50 of KenPom’s defensive efficiency metric. And while Bears freshmen Ja’Kobe Walter and Yves Missi are incredibly talented, they’re also liable to buckle under the pressures of the Big Dance, especially with a potentially tricky second-round matchup against either the Clemson Tigers or New Mexico Lobos. Don’t be surprised if the West winds up being the region with the most chaos this year.

10 Potential Cinderellas in 2024 Men’s NCAA Tournament

Kansas jayhawks (no. 4 seed, midwest region).

Kansas has wins over the UConn Huskies, Houston, Tennessee Volunteers and Kentucky Wildcats as part of a loaded résumé. But the Jayhawks limp into March Madness both literally and figuratively, losers of four of five and dealing with injuries to their two best players in Kevin McCullar Jr. and Hunter Dickinson. Both are expected to play starting with the Jayhawks’ matchup against the Samford Bulldogs on Thursday, but for a team that already severely lacks depth, dealing with injury woes is the last thing Bill Self wants.

While it’s still going to be difficult for run-and-gun Samford to knock off KU, a second-round meeting with the Gonzaga Bulldogs could be brutal. The Zags are actually higher than Kansas on KenPom and are playing their best basketball of the season at the right time, with Ryan Nembhard surging at the point guard spot and Gonzaga’s deep stable of bigs a commodity against Dickinson and the Jayhawks. It might not be a long stay in the Dance for KU.

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Patrick Mahomes, Shakira and Tom Cruise are just some of the celebrities who follow F1

The prestigious motorsport event, formula 1, is often associated with opulence, glamour, and appearances from famous personalities., by janete weinstein • published march 23, 2024 • updated on march 23, 2024 at 9:49 pm.

As Formula 1 gains popularity in the United States, more and more A-list celebrities are drawn to the races.

Fans of F1 love the fact that it is considered the pinnacle of motorsport . They enjoy the recent increase in popularity it has received in the United States and seeing celebrities on the starting grid only reinforces the sport's growth and creates a special bond between fans and drivers.

"You learn to expect the unexpected on a race weekend, you never know who will show up at the paddocks which makes for intrigue and excitement." said a Mercedes fan referring to Tom Cruise's pit stop at the Mercedes garage last season during the London GP.

Celebrities that follow F1 in the U.S

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Who made to the Miami GP?

From Tom Cruise and Shakira to the Jonas Brothers and Vin Diesel, to first-timers like Kansas City Chief's quarterback Patrick Mahomes, there was no shortage of A-listers at the 2023 Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix.

The Miami GP has quickly become one of the most popular racing events in America. Celebrities from all over the country gathered in South Florida to attend the race.

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Many famous athletes and celebrities decided to make a quick pit stop during their down time at the event, despite it only being in its second year.

Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Roger Federer and Jake Paul are among other notables in Miami.

Star-studded turnout in Las Vegas

The Sin City hosted its first GP last year, and it was not short of celebrities strolling around F1 paddocks.

While the world’s greatest drivers sped down the Strip during the inaugural Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, the stars were out and about showing their support for their favorite teams.

The star-studded turnout came a day after Brad Pitt was spotted on the grid and grandstands during the practice session for the Las Vegas Grand Prix on Friday night. 

The 59-year-old actor was seen in a TikTok  video  shared by ESPN walking around the practice session and in another  clip  in the pit lane. Pitt’s attendance comes amid his production in  an upcoming Apple Original film  where he plays veteran Formula 1 driver Sonny Hayes. 

@espn #f1 #formula1 #lasvegasgp #bradpitt #zlatan #celebrity ♬ original sound - ESPN

Among the elite partygoers were actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Casey Affleck, Jon Hamm, Sofia Vergara, Zach Braff and Nina Dobrev; pro athletes James Harden, Shaun White and Odell Beckham Jr.; musicians Justin Bieber, Wiz Khalifa, Leon Bridges and Tyga; and models Ashley Graham and Karlie Kloss, among many others.

Who showed up in Austin?

Here are the celebrities that party with F1 drivers in Texas :

Prince Harry - The Duke of Sussex was spotted chatting with Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton at the Mercedes garage before th e F1 Grand Prix of United States at Circuit of The Americas on October 22, 2023.

Drew Barrymore - The actress and talk show host stopped by during Red Bull racing practice.

Adam Driver - The "Star Wars" actor was walking in the paddock during practice.

Rachel Brosnahan - "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel " actress paid a visit to the Scuderia Alpha Tauri before qualifiers.

Fencer Miles Chamley-Watson, singer/songwriter Joe Jonas and actress Chloë Grace Moretz were also spotted on the grid. 

In addition to Miami's race coming up in May, this year’s F1 schedule includes two more races in the United States. Round 19 will be held in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 20-22, and Round 22 is slated for Las Vegas on Nov. 24-26.

Formula 1 continues to gain steady growth in audience and new followers in the U.S. since the debut of the Netflix docuseries "Drive to Survive ", which is in its 6th season.

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March Madness expert picks: Our bracket predictions for 2024 NCAA men's tournament

Editor's note: Follow all of the men's March Madness action, scores and highlights here with USA TODAY Sports' live coverage.

The experts have dissected the men's NCAA Tournament bracket , providing sleepers, Final Four matchups and upset predictions. Your chances of filling out a perfect bracket are miniscule , but maybe you need a few tips to win your office pool. We've got you covered with a look at how to pick an upset and a look historically at how the seeds have performed in the NCAA Tournament.

Still need help? Here's a closer look at each region: East , West , South , Midwest

Three of our five USA TODAY experts have UConn as their picks to win the national title on April 8. Here are our expert picks:

WOMEN'S PICKS: Our bracket predictions for 2024 NCAA women's tournament

FOLLOW THE MADNESS: NCAA basketball bracket, scores, schedules, teams and more.

Jordan Mendoza

Full bracket

• Final Four : UConn, Arizona, Houston, Creighton
• Final : UConn vs. Houston
• National champion : UConn

Paul Myerberg

• Final Four: Iowa State, North Carolina, Houston, Creighton
• Final: Iowa State vs. Houston
• National champion: Houston

Erick Smith

• Final Four: Iowa State, Baylor, Houston, Purdue
• Final : Iowa State vs. Purdue
• National champion: Iowa State

Eddie Timanus

• Final Four : UConn, North Carolina, Houston, Purdue
• Final: UConn vs. Purdue
• National champion: UConn
• Final Four: UConn, Saint Mary's, Houston, Creighton
• Final: UConn vs. Houston

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California Today

Los Angeles Sports Fans Are Bewildered by Gambling Scandal

A much-anticipated start to baseball season was marred by theft allegations against the interpreter for Shohei Ohtani.

By Jill Cowan

It’s Friday. Angelenos say they’re bewildered after the Los Angeles Dodgers fired the interpreter of Shohei Ohtani, a star player, over a gambling scandal. Plus, a deeper look at new laws to address the intertwined crises of mental illness and homelessness in California.

Fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers were elated in December when Shohei Ohtani, the two-way baseball superstar with a squeaky-clean image, struck a blockbuster deal to join the team.

At $700 million over 10 years, it made Ohtani the highest paid baseball player ever. Fans were even more thrilled by the fact that he agreed to defer most of that salary to free up money for the team to build a winning squad around him.

Although Ohtani had been famous for years, including during his previous six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels and when he played in the Japanese professional league before that, his stardom reached another level with the Dodgers. He immediately vaulted into position as the face of not just the franchise but also of Major League Baseball. Billboards and murals have appeared across the city featuring the pitcher and slugger in Dodger blue.

Now, after bombshell reporting by ESPN and The Los Angeles Times this week that places Ohtani near the center of a gambling scandal involving his longtime interpreter and close friend, many fans say they’re bewildered — but withholding judgment until more information emerges.

“Shocked. Shocked,” said Lisa Jaramillo, 61, a longtime Dodgers fan, on Thursday as she walked through L.A. Live, the downtown complex home to Crypto.com Arena and a cluster of sports bars. “You know, I have to hear both sides.”

Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, told ESPN in a lengthy interview on Tuesday that the baseball star transferred money willingly to an illegal bookmaker in Orange County to help out Mizuhara, who struggled with a gambling addiction. The outlet saw financial records that showed funds had been sent in Ohtani’s name.

But the accounts of what happened changed in less than a day: On Wednesday, the Dodgers abruptly announced that Mizuhara had been fired and Ohtani’s representatives accused the interpreter of stealing millions of dollars from the slugger to pay off gambling debts.

That same day, Mizuhara disavowed his previous statements to ESPN and said that Ohtani knew nothing about the transfers.

The news was particularly stunning because of Ohtani’s brotherly relationship with Mizuhara, who had been his interpreter since he signed with the Angels in 2017. The two were seen joking around in the Dodgers’ dugout hours before the gambling stories broke.

When I was at the Dodgers spring training camp in Arizona last month, the only time I saw Ohtani in the clubhouse, he sat by his locker and spoke exclusively to Mizuhara. The reporters who cover Ohtani treated Mizuhara as a de facto gatekeeper to the star.

This week should have been a joyous one for the Dodgers as they opened the season with two games in South Korea against the San Diego Padres. Instead, the team was suddenly marred by another scandal.

Speculation ran rampant Thursday on sports talk radio and social media about what actually happened and whether Ohtani had known about the payments to the bookie. Some wondered whether the theft allegation was a way to protect Ohtani against wrongdoing after funds were wired in his name to an illegal bookmaker. The overnight change in stories fueled skepticism in Los Angeles.

“As a Dodgers fan, I want nothing more than for what I’m reading to be the truth,” Travis Rodgers , a commentator on ESPN LA, said during a live broadcast on Thursday from the Islands Restaurant in Manhattan Beach, referring to claims that Ohtani didn’t know about the transfers. “All I know is this story stinks. It doesn’t make sense on the surface.”

Fans told me on Thursday that they were inclined to believe that Mizuhara had deceived Ohtani and wondered whether the Dodgers had done their due diligence when he joined the organization.

Above all, though, fans said they hoped that whatever the outcome of the ongoing investigations, the team’s performance wouldn’t suffer.

Giovanni Gochez, 34, a Colorado resident who grew up in the area and is a die-hard Dodgers fan, was visiting Los Angeles with his family on Thursday and spoke in the shadow of the new statue of Kobe Bryant. He said he sat through the entire 18 innings of the team’s Game 3 win in the 2018 World Series.

“I mean, everybody does things behind closed doors,” Gochez said. “As a fan, I’m still right there rooting.”

The rest of the news

California has passed new laws, among them CARE Court, to address the intertwined crises of mental illness and homelessness that critics say could violate the civil liberties of the state’s homeless population . Some families welcome the new measures.

The state Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board, whose members are appointed by the governor, unanimously voted to approve regulations protecting workers from indoor heat despite the Newsom administration suddenly withdrawing its support over state prison cost concerns, CalMatters reports.

Southern California

Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high profiles to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died in Los Angeles at 95.

Central California

The Fresno Unified School District has introduced an app that regulates student trips outside classrooms , like bathroom visits, during instructional periods, The Fresno Bee reports.

Northern California

San Francisco Human Services Agency workers rallied outside their downtown office to protest Proposition F , a new measure that requires people receiving county aid to undergo screening if they are suspected of drug addiction, KQED reports. The workers say the requirement will worsen their staffing crisis.

A Muslim civil rights group is demanding an apology from the city of San Bruno after claiming that Muslim constituents were not allowed to break fast or pray for Ramadan inside City Hall while attending a council meeting, The Los Angeles Times reports.

An audit from the San Francisco Controller’s Office reveals that the nonprofit Mexican Museum, which has sat vacant for years , has misused public funds and raised only a fraction of the money needed to complete its build out, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

And before you go, some good news

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has unveiled a busy lineup of shows for the spring and summer season, with headlining exhibitions from artists, including Kara Walker, Mary Lovelace O’Neal and others.

The museum kicked off the first of several Northern California-themed shows planned for the spring on March 16 with an exhibition of new works by Lovelace O’Neal, the famous Bay Area-based painter.

On April 6, the museum will open a show honoring the 50th anniversary of Creative Growth, a nonprofit organization in Oakland that supports artists with disabilities. The museum will also separately display in April a work from one of the organization’s artists, William Scott, as part of its community-focused, wall mural series.

Read more about the upcoming exhibitions on the museum’s site .

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Monday. Enjoy your weekend.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword .

Maia Coleman, Briana Scalia, Allison Zaucha and Soumya Karlamangla contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at [email protected] .

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox .

Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state. More about Jill Cowan

NCAA Tournament 2024 bracket: Top-rated simulation predicts surprising upsets, March Madness picks, sleepers

T here are multiple NCAA Tournament Cinderella teams every season, and there are sure to be more in the 2024 NCAA Tournament bracket. Saint Peter's burst onto the scene two years ago, becoming the only No. 15 seed ever to advance to the Elite Eight. The Peacocks are back in the 2024 March Madness bracket as a No. 15 seed and will enter the Big Dance full of confidence after winning eight of their last 10 games. Saint Peter's will square off against No. 2 Tennessee in the first round of the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

The Volunteers haven't advanced past the Sweet 16 since 2010. Should your 2024 March Madness bracket picks include backing the Peacocks to pull off a stunning upset in the first round, or should you back another double-digit seed like Nevada (10), James Madison (12) or Samford (13) to make a deep run? Before you make your 2024 NCAA Tournament predictions, see the March Madness bracket picks from the proven computer model at SportsLine .

This model, which simulates every game 10,000 times, has nailed 20 first-round upsets by double-digit seeds since its inception in 2016 and nailed UConn's dramatic Final Four run as a 4-seed last year. It went an amazing 22-10 in the first round, including an astounding 12-4 in the Midwest and West regions.

Last year, SportsLine's computer simulation nailed massive upsets, including huge wins by No. 13 Furman over No. 4 Virginia and No. 10 Penn State over No. 7 Texas A&M . The model has beaten over 92% of all CBS Sports bracket players in three of the past five tournaments.

Now, SportsLine's advanced computer model has simulated the entire 2024 NCAA Tournament 10,000 times to come up with the perfect 2024 NCAA Tournament bracket and find out which teams will pull off the biggest upsets. You shouldn't even think about making a pick without seeing what their model has to say .

Top 2024 March Madness bracket upset picks

One Midwest Region surprise the model has identified: No. 11 seed Oregon knocks off No. 6 seed South Carolina. The Ducks reeled off three consecutive victories to be crowned champions of the Pac-12 Tournament. Oregon is led by Jermaine Couisnard, who's averaging 15.4 points, 3.3 assists and 1.6 steals per game.

Center N'Faly Dante is expected to have a big day when the Ducks take the court on Thursday. The 6-foot-11 senior averages 16.2 points and 8.8 rebounds per game while knocking down 70.2% of his field goal attempts. South Carolina ranks outside the top 200 in defensive rebounds and blocks, which could be an issue against Dante and the Ducks. With the Gamecocks also ranking 64th out of 68 tournament teams in creating turnovers, that presents more possessions for Oregon and more opportunities for Dante to make his presence felt.

Another Midwest Region surprise the model has identified: No. 5 Gonzaga beats No. 4 Kansas to advance to the Sweet 16. The Bulldogs have four players averaging in double-figures, including forward Anton Watson. The 6-foot-8 senior enters March Madness 2024 averaging 14.1 points and 7.1 rebounds per game while knocking down 57.7% of his field goals.

As a team, the Zags are making 57.2% of their field goals, which ranks eighth in the nation. That's a big reason why Gonzaga is scoring 84.9 points per game on average, the seventh-most in college basketball. Meanwhile, the Jayhawks are making just 32.9% of their 3-pointers this season, which ranks 237th in the country. Bill Self's squad will also be without leading scorer Kevin McCullar Jr. due to a knee injury in the NCAA Tournament.  See which other 2024 March Madness matchups to target here .

How to make 2024 NCAA Tournament bracket predictions

Who wins every tournament-defining matchup? And which teams will make surprising runs through the 2024 NCAA Tournament bracket? With the model's track record of calling bracket-busting upsets, you'll want to see which stunners it's calling this year before locking in any 2024 NCAA bracket picks .

So what's the optimal NCAA Tournament 2024 bracket? And which NCAA Tournament Cinderella teams will shock college basketball?  Visit SportsLine to see which 12-seed reaches the Sweet 16, and which region features a 10-seed, 11-seed, and 13-seed delivering first-round shockers and has a 9-seed in the Elite Eight, all from the model that has beaten 92% of bracket players three of the last five tournaments .