Attention: Your next must-read sports piece

Last updated on: August 26, 2012 at 10:58 pm by Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Attention: Your next must-read sports piece 2012-08-26T22:58:18-04:00 Sarah Pulliam Bailey

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Stop whatever you are doing. If you read one story this week, make it this one from Grantland.

But brace yourself. The piece is more than 7,000 words. Add it to Instapaper, Pocket, bookmark or whatever you use to read stories later, because you’ll be in it for the long haul, at least in Internet time.

Why do I like this somewhat random story so much? I’m not even drawn to reading many sports stories because I assume my sports journalist husband will filter the interesting ones out for me or tell me about them over dinner. There are so many hours in a day, you know?

But this story stops me in my tracks and makes me want to email it to everyone I know. It’s that good.

Here’s the premise: former LSU goalie Mo Isom tried to become a kicker for the Tigers football team. I’ll be honest: I don’t care about LSU, I don’t care about college soccer, I probably wouldn’t naturally care about a story about a football kicker, even as a woman. But her path to tryouts is what makes her story interesting.

I’m torn by how much to reveal without giving away the beautiful writing you read to understand Isom’s story. There are bits and pieces along the way that if I were to summarize and offer a nugget here and there, it would be like spoiling plot points. But here’s a small section that gives you a tiny sense of what she’s been through.

There is a website called Tiger Droppings, where a few thousand LSU fans gather each day to post emoticons and anonymous opinions. Back in March, a poster started a thread titled, “Mo Isom is a buck-90????” Apparently, TigerTaterTots couldn’t believe Isom weighed 190 pounds.

It took one minute for the first reply: “Don’t care. Would hit it.” Eight posts later, someone rekindled a longstanding message board debate: Who’s hotter? Isom or Erin Andrews? Two pages passed before the first picture of Isom in a bikini, five pages before someone casually suggested date rape. “Mo is a great girl with an amazing life story,” wrote one poster. “She is gorgeous and way too respectable to have people shallowly critique her looks.” Two posts later: “Does anyone know her bra size?”

Reducing athletes to something less than human has been a favored pastime among SEC fans for at least a decade, but it’s safe to assume there are no date-rape jokes about Russell Shepard or Barkevious Mingo. No matter how well she blends, how much she is accepted, how perfectly she navigates the obstacles that arise when a woman enters a man’s game, there will still be someone, somewhere, for whom Isom is nothing more than a thing to be picked apart and appraised — a subject for the enduring online debate, Would you hit it?

The quote above doesn’t even capture the storyline in the rest of the piece, but it’s an example of the serious issues addressed. From a GetReligion point of view, the reporter not only gets a good story about a woman’s physical, athletic and family struggle, but guess what: Grantland writer Jordan Conn captures the faith element. “She’d been raised Methodist, and her faith had always been important, if not all-consuming,” he writes, not just generically explaining that she was vaguely spiritual or religious.

The writer takes the time to go into pretty significant detail over not only just her faith, but her intense struggle with her faith, doubt, frustration and other feelings as she faced hurdles.

So I remember driving home and literally crying out to God — “You’re full of crap. This is all fake. God, if you’re so real, if you love me, if you love me the way that you say that you love me, then show me. Do something.” Because everyone’s sitting there the whole time telling you, “God’s gonna, he’s gonna act in your life, and move in you, and you’ll feel it and know that he’s real.” And you’re just like, what a load of B.S. I never felt like that. So I said, “If you’re so real, show me in a way that I will know.”

Again, without giving away the story, you’ll have to read it to find out how the reporter deals with this tension with everything else she had going on in her life. So, with the precious Internet time you have left, stop scrolling through Reddit or Pinterest or watching that kitten falling asleep clip; this story is that good, one you’ll find worthy of your time and attention.

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