Abstract
Box scores on back pages and hagiographic biographies are what come to mind when we think of sports writing. Often maligned as low brow, sports writing is rarely considered as creative and nuanced, or seen in its multiple forms such as short fiction, poetry, plays, novels, long form essays, and creative non-fiction (see Symons et al., 2022). While some sports have been afforded something of a literary tradition, boxing for example with contributions from heavyweights Norman Mailer (The Fight, 1975) and Joyce Carol Oates (On Boxing, 1987), others, football (soccer) for example, the world’s most popular sport (Kuper & Szymanski, 2018), have, until recently, been regarded as having none (see McGowan, 2019).