Below is an excerpt from Noreen Malone’s review of Rules of the Game:  The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine on Slate.  You can read the full review here.

Harper’s Magazine has produced a remarkable amount of it in its 160-year history, the gems of which are now collected in Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing From Harper’s Magazine. There are meditations on the enterprise itself (Gary Cartwright on the practice of sportswriting, for example.), but lest you think this is a pointy-headed, navel-gazing book, such selections are tempered by vigorous reported pieces—George Plimpton on the Moscow Olympics or, delightfully, on the sonnet-inspiring meeting of Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali; Lewis Lapham on the steroid scandals. The table of contents is a murderer’s row of American writers: Mark Twain, Shirley Jackson, Tom Wolfe.