More than news writing, more than editorial writing, more than feature, business, or food writing, the best contemporary sports writing draws its strength from a tradition of literary excellence that goes back 100 years.

"The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail," wrote Heywood Broun in 1923 for the New York World. That pun on Truth and Ruth was followed by the straight stuff: "He did yesterday. Babe made two home runs and the Yankees won from the Giants at the Polo Grounds by a score of 4 to 2. This evens up the World's Series, with one game for each contender." Broun delivered the news, but with flair.

That same year, Grantland Rice covered the Yale-Harvard football game, a big sporting event back then. Rice, a notorious sports mythologizer, never missed a chance to turn a game into an apocalyptic apotheosis:

On a gridiron of 17 lakes, five quagmires and eight water hazards, Yale rode through the surf of a tidal wave to beat Harvard by 13 to 0 this afternoon, in the strangest football ever played. Under conditions that would have baffled Johnny Weismuller and a shoal of fish, the Blue came back to glory above the beaten Crimson for the first time in seven years. And for the first time in 14 long and weary years a Yale team cut its way to victory upon a Harvard field, rising above destiny itself to reach the heights.

OK, so it's a little inflated, but the New York Tribune could tolerate 100-word leads back then. A thriftier scribe might have written: "Finally, Yale beat Harvard 13 to 0 -- on the road and in the rain."

I found these two classics in the antique anthology, "The Best News Stories of 1923." They should remind us of the important role sports journalism has played in the history of newspapers, and how often the culture of the playing field inspires the writer to heights of creativity, passion and wit.

In an age of video games, sports talk radio, ESPN and Yahoo!, ex-jocks turned cable television gas bags, Olympic hype, steroid abuse, homepages and fan blogs, it may be time for a simple sports writing renaissance. But how does the aspiring sports journalist grow in the craft?

Toward the end of his storied career, Red Smith described how he learned to become a better writer.  Just as the young athlete copies the moves of established champions, so the young writer looks up to models of excellence: "I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me," wrote Smith. "...When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others ... But slowly, by what process I have no idea, your own writing tends to crystallize, to take shape. Yet you've learned some moves from all these guys and they are somehow incorporated into your own style. Pretty soon you're not imitating any longer."

Let's move from "Best News Stories of 1923" to a beaten-up copy of "Best Sports Stories, 1960." (The book dealer said he'd sell it to me for fifty cents; I gave him a buck.) In this volume, we encounter writers who took up the torch passed on to them by the likes of Heywood Broun and Grantland Rice. Dick Schaap wrote this lead to a profile of a Hall of Famer, a guy so tough that even his wife chewed tobacco:

Nellie Fox spat a slick stream of tobacco juice into the pocket of his glove. He had just been body-blocked at second base by Hank Bauer, and now he was angry -- not because he'd been hit, but because he thought Bauer had left the baselines. Suddenly Casey Stengel popped out of the New York Yankee dugout and began waddling bowlegged toward the pitcher's mound. Fox glared at Stengel and spat again. "What are you going to do, you old sunuvabitch?" Fox snarled. "Tell funny stories?"

By 1960, the crafty Texas scribe, Blackie Sherrod, was covering the Harvard/Yale football game. Blackie was less interested in Grantland Rice's idolization of the athlete and more inclined toward a bit of gentle iconoclasm. Remember, this is a Texan writing: "As long as he's in the vicinity, don't you know, a chap should certainly take in The Game. / And iffen you don't know what The Game is, then you ain't got a large amount of couth and don't stand there wiping your nose on your sleeve and mumbling apologies."

I'm tempted to argue that Sherrod and such contemporaries as Schapp, W. C. Heinz,  Furman Bisher, Red Smith, Roger Kahn, Pete Hamill, Jim Murray, Ed Pope, Frank Deford, Jimmy Cannon and Dan Jenkins, to name a few, made the 1960s the Golden Age of sports writing. It was the era of the scribe, a time when the local sports columnist emerged as one of the most popular and important figures in the land. They were humorists and storytellers, wordsmiths and reporters, advocates and critics, arguably the most important and innovative authors in their newspapers and magazines.

Which is why, moving ahead another 40 years, I was so gratified to see Mike Lupica, the editor of "Best American Sports Writing 2005," look back to credit those whose work inspired the champion sports journalists of our time. He cites this passage from the great Dan Jenkins, writing in 1966 for Sports Illustrated about one of the most famous ties in college football history:

Old Notre Dame will tie over all. Sing it out, guys. That is not exactly what the march says, of course, but that is how the big game ends every time you replay it. And that is how millions of cranky college football fans will remember it. For 59 minutes in absolutely overwrought East Lansing last week, the brutes of Notre Dame and Michigan State pounded each other into enough mistakes to fill Bubba Smith's uniform -- enough to settle a dozen games between lesser teams -- but the 10-10 tie that destiny seemed to be demanding had a strange, noble quality to it. And then it did not have that anymore. For the people who saw it under the cold, dreary clouds or on national television, suddenly all it had was this enormous emptiness for which the Irish will be forever blamed.

If Dan Jenkins can be said to be one of the literary parents of Mike Lupica, he's the real father of Sally Jenkins, the outstanding sports columnist for The Washington Post. Sally and more than 15 of her peers have offered their services to teach at Poynter's first big conference devoted to sports writing. The dates are April 12-14, and, as of this writing, we have received almost 100 applications for about 150 spots. The conference is open to anyone willing to pay $195 to participate in practical and inspirational workshops taught by some of the masters of the craft.

Sally Jenkins learned a lot from her daddy, but Dan has learned a lot from her as well. Those lessons of craft are available to anyone willing to reach for them, lessons that go back a century and continue to be passed on from one generation of sports writers to another.