The Year in Sports

1. Penn State. Imagine, for a minute, that you’d heard the breaking news out of Happy Valley described this way: The head of a popular children’s charity was arrested for sexually abusing young boys in central Pennsylvania. He was a former college football coach, yes, but only a defensive assistant, not a head coach, and he hadn’t been employed in that capacity for more than a decade. What’s more, his alleged victims were not themselves athletes of national or even regional renown. And this galvanized sports desks all over the country, in a way that few, if any, stories in recent memory have? The Jerry Sandusky scandal resonated so broadly in large part because it followed on the heels of smaller scandals at Ohio State (tattoos for trinkets) and Miami (prostitutes and drugs for recruits), calling into question the ultimate viability of the N.C.A.A. itself. This was also the year, remember, when we learned that the much-abused phrase “student-athlete” began as the cynical confection of a legal team seeking to avoid workers’-comp liability in the nineteen-fifties.

2. The lockouts. Both the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. seasons nearly weren’t, after all, and, for months, instead of reading about LeBron’s rehabilitation campaign, or Brady vs. Manning, we were treated to press conferences with the suits (DeMaurice Smith, Adam Silver) and balance-sheet analysis to rival Enron coverage.

3. Hockey’s hellish summer. The perpetual also-ran among team sports in this country might have benefitted more from the labor struggles in football and especially basketball were it not for the premature deaths of three N.H.L. enforcers and the lingering concern over the concussed brain of one of the world’s preëminent living athletes, Sidney Crosby. Instead of welcoming new waves of fans to the dangerous thrills of the greatest and fastest game, N.H.L. executives were forced to confront a steady drip of news that was principally the N.F.L.’s headache last year. Danger is no longer so thrilling when the players move so powerfully and quickly that the very best among them are rendered incapacitated for long stretches, and when the executives in charge react with the defensiveness of tobacco and asbestos manufacturers.

4. Dope, dope, and more dope. Arguably the greatest batter and the greatest pitcher who ever played baseball both went on trial for perjury in 2011. Neither Barry Bonds nor Roger Clemens has worn a uniform in years, but that didn’t stop them both from grabbing their share of headlines and casting a shadow over Bud Selig’s penultimate season as Commissioner. The leak, earlier this month, of the N.L. M.V.P. Ryan Braun’s failed drug test helps give the lie to the oft-repeated claim that, by humiliating Bonds and Clemens in such extended fashion, we have put the performance-enhancement dilemma behind us.

Grim stuff, ain’t it? Richard Ford also wrote that sportswriting “gets boring when it strays from sports acts themselves; when it goes into the counting rooms and doesn’t return, or into the jail cell or the rehab unit or the divorce court and leaves actual sports behind.” So, with that caution in mind, I’ll nominate Tim Tebow as the year’s best sports story (with an apology and a hat tip to the wonderfully implausible baseball games of September 28th). Certainly Tebow-mania offers plenty of crossover fodder for the non-sports-obsessed. You don’t need to be a connoisseur of quarterback throwing mechanics to find debates over Tebow’s conspicuous religiosity of interest, or to marvel over the fact that teen-agers on Long Island have apparently been suspended from school for imitating a silly made-for-TV pose. But that’s all just context. What’s great about Tebow is the live-action performance: maddening, baffling, and, just often enough, jaw-dropping. In an era where passing statistics have been inflating to Bondsian levels, Tebow has brought his team to the brink of the playoffs with a style that might as well have come from the dead-ball era. Is it luck? Divine intervention? Here’s to watching and cursing and shaking our heads in disbelief in 2012.

Illustration by Jim Stoten; photograph by Lauren Lancaster. See more of Lancaster’s Penn State photographs at Photo Booth.

Read more from The New Yorker’s 2011: The Year in Review, at News Desk and at Culture Desk.