Dear Readers, 

I miss the crowds. I miss the bars. I miss high-fiving. I don’t want to lose focus on the much bigger concerns facing our society right now. Each day, COVID-19’s death toll increases. Each day, joblessness in our own communities, and around the globe, continues to get worse. The dose of clarity we craved for what our future might hold when this pandemic started has yet to show itself. More families will lose loved ones before this is over. More people will lose their jobs. It’s not responsible to talk about how much I miss the things listed above, readers, but I do miss them, and I miss them dearly. 

When I think about missing these things, when I try to wrap my head around the reality that sports are back, but we still don’t have each other. I think back to my conversation with last issue’s author interview, Chris McCormick. Chris and I talked about a lot of things, most notably his brilliant debut novel The Gimmicks. When it came time for us to talk about the one thing we missed the most about sports during the pandemic, we both had the same answer. We both miss the moment. 

The moment when a game that just happens to be on in the background becomes so much more than a game that just happens to be on in the background. The moment you walk into a bar half a world away from where you’re from, but you can already find your team on the screen above an empty stool because the bartender remembers you from the last game you watched there. The moment when any stranger sitting next to you can become a mortal enemy, but more likely, a new best friend, or both, it can happen, there are no rules here. 

The lonesomeness of quarantine has magnified the holes in life that the moment once filled. Whenever I’ve been traveling on my own, or felt lonely in a new city, I would venture out into the world, seeking the warmth and the refuge of the moment. Whether it’s finding a familiar game in an unfamiliar place, or the sound of a loud, crisp, perfectly executed high-five, the moment has introduced me to countless friends and experiences in my life that I would feel incomplete without. The moment’s absence this year has been more difficult to handle than I initially anticipated and compounded with the blows of effectively losing Sports Illustrated (the SI we know and love, at least) and the announcement that The Best American Sports Writing Series will not continue past 2020. 

Sports have been back on the air for months, in empty arenas across the land filled with piped-in crowd noise and haunted by the ghosts of the memories we’re not making. It is this current lack of moments, lack of communal gatherings we’re so used to having, and a further lack of places to publish work about sports, that I believe makes writing about sports more important now than it has ever been. 

I don’t believe sports writing can cure a deadly disease, but as I read the work that makes up this new issue of the Under Review, I could feel all my dark, lonely, pits of lonesomeness dug by this pandemic, fill with comfort, humor, and all-consuming joy. I feel hope when I think about this issue. I feel whole again when I read and relive these moments. And I think I can speak for all of us when I say this issue’s breathtaking cover has me feeling ready to tape up and knock this whole year the fuck out.

Writing about sports can’t save us from death, but in all the small but real ways I wrote about in my letter to open the first issue of this journal, it can remind us how to live.

Thank you to our fantastic contributors, for capturing the moment in all the brilliant ways you did and for sharing them with us. Thank you, readers, so much for spending time with the Under Review. I can’t wait to share a moment with you in person sometime soon. 

Sincerely,
Terry Horstman
Executive Editor
the Under Review