Comments (0) Best Sportswriter - 2011
Dan Le Batard
He's big-headed, stubborn, childish, and most certainly a mama's boy. On Pardon the Interruption, an ESPN show he occasionally guest-hosts, he's known as "the hatable Dan Le Batard," and he introduces himself with varying forms of the word bam. But Dan Le Batard can also write like rain, like the purest form of nourishment pouring from the sky. His ideas are often counterintuitive, his notions unorthodox. He cares about the athletes he covers, about the people, and those are the stories he tells. From a Le Batard column about the downfall of Bernie Kosar, the great college and pro quarterback whose success on the field could not prevent failure in every other aspect of life: "The game was fast and muscled. He was neither. He was always the giraffe trying to survive among lions. Still is, really. He has merely traded one cutthroat arena in which people compete for big dollars for another, and today's is a hell of a lot less fun than the one that made him famous. More painful, too, oddly enough."
