Flinder Boyd

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in sports writing.

How a promising basketball star ended up facing drug and murder charges.

Thomas “TJ” Webster Jr. is a 24-year-old kid from Sacramento who quit his job as a janitor at a Greyhound bus station for a chance to drive across country and play basketball at Harlem’s legendary Rucker Park:

“A couple of days before, he took me from his place to Roosevelt Park on 10th and P Street, a quiet well-manicured playground just south of downtown. Right away, he asked again if I wanted to play one-on-one. I had on jeans and low-top sneakers and hadn’t planned on playing, but he needed to prove to me he had game, so I agreed. He showed off his turnaround jumper, quick hops and sharp lateral quickness. The hours of hard work had paid off and we split two games to 11. But when more players showed up for the noontime run, the crater-sized holes in his game became obvious.”

How Copeland went from European basketball unknown to 29-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks:

“You are never fully at ease, but you begin to transition. Maybe you date a local girl, or even marry her. You begin to buy tighter jeans, learn some of the language and before you can blink, you are in the twilight of your career. Eventually, you do move back home and tell anyone that will listen that you did, in fact, play pro basketball. You try to find a 9-to-5 job while fighting off the inevitable depression that comes from losing the only thing you’ve ever truly loved, and, over time, you forget you ever had a dream in the first place. It’s a good life, at times an amazing life, filled with peaks and valleys higher and lower than you could ever imagine. And then, it’s over.

“For Copeland, however, there remained a gnawing inside his gut. No matter how well he did, it wasn’t quite enough. ‘I was feeling sad even though I was having a lot of success. In my head,’ he said. ‘I just still believed I could do better. I knew if I didn’t make it, I’d look back with a lot of regrets.'”

The evolution of a Spanish basketball star turned NBA player, from the perspective of a fellow player:

“I was playing in Spain at the time, and was there as the nation slipped into inescapable Rubio-mania. In the grocery store people wanted to talk about him; in our locker room we laughed about the boy who turned the ACB, the second best league in the world, into his personal And1 mixtape. He was the next Pistol Pete, the next Magic. There wasn’t a comparison too far-fetched.

“I remember watching his team, DKV Joventut, on TV and mentioning to a friend that he played so calm and free, so relaxed under immense pressure. And it was striking, the way he played each game as if it was happening in the park before he had to race home to set the table for the family dinner. But it wasn’t just his highlights that fascinated me. He reminded me of the basketball I grew up watching. This was before APBRmetrics and Hollinger’s stats parsed every minutia of detail into digestible numbers, quantifying a lot but inevitably missing the raw, visceral effect of watching a player play. It was a time, in short, when it was easier to see the game purely subjectively, and as art. And it was impossible to see Rubio as anything but an artist.”