Today in good sportswriting: Karen Crouse sneaks in classic Bob Knight

August 12th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

It’s not often enough that I just stop and say, hey, that’s a good piece of sports journalism, but today is that day. The New York Times’ Karen Crouse not only wrote an interesting profile of 50-meter freestyle swimmers, she dropped a semi-funny (or maybe I’m just not caffeinated enough — trying to ditch the habit) reference to Bob Knight:

Jones’s stroke rate was high, indicating he was spinning his wheels, not catching the water as efficiently with each arm pull as he had in the preliminaries when he was clocked in an American record of 21.59 seconds. Garrett Weber-Gale, who took first at the trials, lowered it to 21.47. “I was rotating my arms too fast,” Jones said. Or in layman’s terms, he said, “I panicked.”

The 50 freestyle is perhaps the most misunderstood of Olympic swimming events. Because it is the first race most children try when dipping their big toes into year-around competitive swimming, it is easy to get the wrong impression. To be a specialist in the event is to continually fight the perception that, to paraphrase former basketball coach Bob Knight, all swimmers learn to race the 50 freestyle in the second grade and most go on to better things.

Yes, Karen Crouse, you sly journalistic devil you. Working in a self-reference about Bob Knight’s views on journalism into a sports journalism piece about swimming is notably brilliant. Also: So meta my head burst. But again, that might just be the caffeine.