Ebbets Field
Letter from the editor
Dear Reader:
Ebbets Field is something I have been thinking about doing for four years. When I resiged as a high school basketball coach in 1996, I looked for knew ways to expend energy. I bought a computer that summer, ostensibly to prepare for the GRE. In reality I bought it to learn about the Internet and Web publishing.
A good friend of mine named Joey Pearlman knows more about sports than any living human beings not named Bill James or Joel Buschbaum. I figured I had to create an avenue for him to express himself on the subject he knows so well. He's basically too shy to demand that WBT in Charlotte, N.C. -- where he practices law -- give him his own sports talk show.
In January I returned to school to get my master's in journalism at Indiana University. I saw a course in the catalog about building Webzines. I knew that course was for me. It offered me a chance to get Pearlman's most recent witicisms on sports and my own occasional writings out in the brave new world of the Internet. Thus, Ebbets Field is born.
Ebbets Field is a webzine devoted to major issues in contemporary sports. The magazine features three types of stories: (1) persuasive essays, (2) personal essays and (3) informative essays. The sources of these essays include daily newspaper columns, newspaper features and magazine features. The journal will also feature Pearlman's sports pieces and my own feature stories and columns. I have also invited one of my former students, Bobby Booker, to write for EF. Bobby will be a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill next fall. Bobby plans to major in journalism and wants to be a sportswriter.
Ebbets Field looks at the effect of society on sports and, conversely, sports on society. The magazine places sports in the context of being primarily entertainment while examining ethical, aesthetic and legal issues within sports. What Ebbets Field will not be is another sports newsmagazine like Sports Illustrated of The Sporting News. Readers who want that can go to our Links page and click onto one of those magazines. Ebbets Field examines sports subjects in depth and with an eye toward the ironic and symbolic. The journal also hopes to inject a sense of humor into its pages.
The magazine�s readers are sports fans who want to take a more-than-cursory look at the games people play. The readers are interested in looking at sports up close and from a distance. This magazine attempts to have both a journalistic and literary bent. Thus, the purpose of the magazine is to provide to such readers insight and reflection on such topics as why college sports cannot police itself, why a country as obsessed with sports as the U.S. is so overweight, why so many athletes are in trouble with the law and why Americans totally ignore sports in other countries.
Currently, there are no other magazines on the Internet like Ebbets Field. Sports Illustrated does have works of formal and informal essays in it and SI does write expository pieces about controversial topics, but those are not published on the Web. A journal called Ebbets Field has a literary feel to it, but almost none of its articles are published on the Web. Similarly, readers might occasionally find extensive essays on sports in publications like The New Yorker, GQ or Esquire, but they are not available on the Internet either. Thus, Ebbets Field is filling a void for well-written, reflective essays on sports. For example, in the first edition we have a column by Pearlman on the conflict of interested that arose when ESPN named Michael Jordan the athlete of the 20th century when the program was sponsored by NIKE, for whom Jordan is a major promoter.
Ebbets Fieldis updated daily with major features updated once a week. The views of the magazine and its articles in no way represent the trustees, administration, faculty, staff or students of Indiana University. The magazine is not affiliated with the university. IU owns the domain name for the website. The magazine is under construction in an Indiana University journalism class under the guidance of professor Edward Gubar and lab assistant Jenn McCormick.
The title of the magazine comes from the Greek elysion, a plain where the virtuous existed after death. The term Ebbets Field in modern literature refers to any place or condition of bliss. It is the editor�s belief that activities on the sports field or court have the potential to offer bliss and that in many ways is the goal of the webzine: to provide a sense of contentment as readers reflect on the nature of what amounts to children�s games. Who can forget a game of catch, 21 or pickup up soccer with a friend growing up. As Frank Pembleton, the existential detective in �Homicide: Life on the Street,� says: �Life would be OK if there were just puppy dogs and kids.�
All best,
David W. Bulla, Ebbets Field editor
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