SIDECOUNTRY

Triumphs and tragedies beyond the realm of organized sports.

New York Times sports reporter Branch has selected 20 articles from more than 2,000 pieces featuring people whose passions drive them to take on intense, quirky, sometimes risky challenges. The title essay, awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013, focuses on skiers caught in an avalanche on the wild slopes known as “side country”—“just outside the controlled parts of a ski area”—a phrase that aptly describes other terrains that Branch surveys. A palpable sense of peril and terror infuses many pieces: about climbers scaling the sleek surface of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall, a dayslong feat that requires sleeping in hanging cots attached to bolts on the mountain; competitors in the terrifying motor sport of figure-eight car racing; alligator hunters in Alabama; divers for abalone confronting surf, riptides, swells, and threatening weather off the coast of northern California; and, not least, Sherpas retrieving a body from Mount Everest. Other pieces reveal uncommon dedication: a coach rebuilding a football field after a tornado; cross-country runners among the Hopi; big-game hunters whose ultimate pursuit is the killing of one wild sheep, an effort that involves weeks—sometimes year after year—of trekking and stalking as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars required for a permit, money that funds wildlife preservation. The most absurd event Branch covered surely must be Intergroom, a three-day trade show for the grooming of dogs and cats into such entertaining personages as the Mad Hatter or Lady Gaga. Among the most moving were one of his daughter’s soccer games, in which a girl whose mother was slain by the Las Vegas shooter in 2017 scored a winning goal; and a profile of the Lady Jaguars, a girls’ basketball team operated by the Carroll County Juvenile Court (Tennessee) to give structure and focus to the players’ lives.

Spirited tales from a sympathetic observer.