The Sports Journalist is the novel that internationally established Richard Ford, of whom Raymond Carver wrote that he was "the best writer active in our country" and the French critic Bernard Géniès stated, in a survey in Le Nouvel Observateur, that "it is becoming quietly becoming the best American writer.

Frank Bascombe is thirty-eight years old and has a magnificent future as a writer behind him. He once enjoyed a brief moment of glory, after the publication of a book of short stories, but then he abandoned literature, or was abandoned by it. Now he writes about sports and interviews athletes, whom he admires because "they have no time for doubts or introspection." And writing about victories and defeats, about winners of the future or yesterday, has allowed him to learn a brief lesson: "In There are no transcendental issues in life. "Things happen and then they're over, and that's it." A lesson that could apply to his fleeting fame as a writer, to his brief marriage, or to the short life of his eldest son, Ralph, who died at the age of nine.

What is the drama that has caused the failure of his marriage? Why has Bascombe given up literature? What animates him, if not a "morality of apathy", a living life from moment to moment, an avoidance of suicide by the paths of the desired analgesic banality? The sports journalist is an implacable testimony of the inevitable disappointments, of the corrosion of ambitions, of learning the minimum pleasures that allow survival.

«A compulsively readable novel, which has as much to do with sports reporting as Moby Dick does with whaling. Richard Ford writes about the contemporary man, lost in the labyrinth of everyday life, a survivor capable of weathering all storms" (George Vecsey, sports journalist for The New York Times).