JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Nine Lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Nine


Week Nine - 1

● This week, we launch into The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.

● There are a total of 13 factual articles that must be read for the week.

● Among the selections are two of the all-time greats.


Week Nine - 2

● The two are: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” by John Updike and “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee.

● Both are known for the stylistic portrayal of the subject and level of detail in the storytelling, which are the hallmarks of literature. Spend time with all of the works but really luxuriate in the writing contained in these two.


Week Nine - 3

● The selections open with Roger Angell, whose work “The Interior Stadium” opened the semester.

● Angell’s “The Web of the Game” (1981) focuses on a college pitching duel between Yale’s Ron Darling and Frank Viola of St. John’s amid an extended conversation with old-time great Smoky Joe Wood.


Week Nine - 4

● Angell’s work is an appropriate opening to this sequence because he shows how to connect the past, the present and future through a game, hence the title.

● In this case, he connects a May 1981 college game in New Haven with a September 1912 game at Fenway Park.


Week Nine - 5

● That sets the tone for the holistic, literary approach to sports that works, even in the contemporary world of tweets and fantasy leagues.

● In a literary sense, sports is a continuum, with seasons building on seasons and contemporary players standing in context with historical, heroic figures and games.


Week Nine - 6

● A.J. Liebling’s “Ahab and Nemesis” (1995) brings a startling proposition to the table in the piece about the boxer Archie Moore.

● “What would Moby-Dick be if Ahab and succeeded? Just another fish story.”


Week Nine - 7

● “The thing that is eternally diverting is the struggle of man against history – or what Albert Camus, who used to be an amateur middleweight, has called the Myth of Sisyphus,” he wrote.

● That struggle of man against history is an important theme coursing through sports literature.


Week Nine - 8

● Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1960) describes in exquisite detail the last game of Ted Williams at Fenway Park.

● It contains one of the most iconic sentences in factual literature: “Gods do not answer letters.”


Week Nine - 9

● “The Only Games in Town” by Anthony Lane (2008) is a detailed report on the Beijing Olympics and how the experience is dramatically different at the venues than it is at home watching the network broadcast.

● “What NBC chooses to broadcast is not the Olympic Games,” he writes.


Week Nine - 10

● Bill Barich’s “Race Track” (1980) is a factual account from off-track betting and track sites that exquisitely details the patrons.

● “They were intent, blind to their surroundings, and they all looked terrific, at least until the first race had gone off. Optimism put a bloom on every cheek.”


Week Nine - 11

● “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee (1965) and about Bill Bradley is factual sports literature at its best.

● It marks the moment in sports writing where athletes could be presented as whole people, not heroic caricatures (think of the fictional Merriwell), in the context of deep and detailed reporting.


Week Nine - 12

● The opening description of the Princeton gym sets the tone and serves as an example of how sportswriters can deploy sharp observational detail beyond the ordinary to carry the reader into a story.

● That narrative technique is evident throughout the work.


Week Nine - 13

● “Nonetheless, he does make something of a spectacle of himself when he moves in rapidly parallel to the baseline, glides through the air with his back to the basket, looks for a teammate he can pass to, and, finding none, tosses the ball into the basket over one shoulder, like a pinch of salt.”


Week Nine - 14

● “El Unico Matador” by Lillian Ross (1949) serves to stretch the range of factual reporting into bullfighting in Spain and Mexico.

● This piece is a profile of Sidney Franklin, the only U.S. citizen to secure global fame as a bullfighter. She ranged off the well-trod path of U.S. sports to find him.


Week Nine - 15

● Interestingly, Ross connects Franklin to the fictional bullfighter of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which we explored in the context of the Sports Ritual Hero.

● As it turns out, Franklin knew Hemingway, Ross reveals.


Week Nine - 16

● She quotes Franklin: “ ‘Ernest taught me how to put people into two categories,” he says. “One the good guys, and two, the bastards. If you’re a good guy, anything goes. If not, I don’t want to be around you.’ “


Week Nine - 17

● “Net Worth” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (1998) reports on Michael Jordan and his life as both a legendary basketball player and corporate spokesperson.

● Gates’ list of Jordan’s endorsements serves to reveal the depth to which the basketball players had infiltrated American corporate and commercial life.


Week Nine - 18

● Gates points out that Jordan represents the “winner- take-all celebrity” that represents the overall economic battle underway in the U.S.

● That shows how sport is merely a platform for a larger commercial space athletes now inhabit.


Week Nine - 19

● “Michael Jordan has become the greatest corporate pitchman of all time. As a twentieth-century sports hero, he has plausible competition from Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali; as an agent of brand equity, he is without peer,” Gates writes.


Week Nine - 20

● Michael Specter’s “The Long Ride” (2002) provides access to another world ignored by everyday sportswriting: pro cycling.

● Specter’s attention to the physical demands of the sport is exceptional as he tells the story of Lance Armstrong.


Week Nine - 21

● “Born Slippy” by John Seabrook (1998) further enlarges our perspective of sports literature as it profiles figure skater Michelle Kwan.

● “They’re like sixteen-year-olds going on thirty-eight,” Seabrook writes of figure skaters.


Week Nine - 22

● “The Chosen One” by David Owen (2000) is a penetrating look at the rise of Tiger Woods, with detailed information on his parents and his knowledge of the history of the game.

● Importantly, the story reveals how Woods’ “views about race are attractively complicated.”


Week Nine - 23

● Alva Johnston’s “Legend of a Sport” (1950) recounts the story of Wilson Mizner, a boxing manager who understood the seedy underside to the sport and profited because of that.

● Yet the story is much more important than that as the following excerpt reveals:


Week Nine - 24

● “Nineteen hundred and nine was the big year of the White Hopes. The barrooms were the chief intellectual centers of the country at the time, and it was their despairing conviction that the long career of the fair-skinned peoples had ended with the defeat of Tommy Burns by Jack Johnson in 1908.”


Week Nine - 25

● Rebecca Mead’s “A Man Child in Lotusland” (2002) is a profile of Shaquille O’Neal, covering the period when he played for the Los Angeles Lakers.

● Mead describes Shaq this way: “He offers a combination of cartoonish playfulness and wholesome values.”


Week Nine - 26

● Throughout the piece, Mead shows that the combination stands opposite of Michael Jordan’s public persona, and as a result, O’Neal is unique.

● She also shows how shifts in basketball marketing created the platform for O’Neal to succeed.


Week Nine - 27

● “The growth of professional basketball over the past twenty-odd years from a relatively minor spectator sport to a mass-cultural phenomenon is an example of the way in which all of American culture is increasingly geared to the tastes of teenage boys … Nikes aren’t cool all over the world because Vince Carter wears them but because cool American teenagers wear them.”


Week Nine - 28

● Each of the 13 works in Parts One and Two reflect factual sports literature at its finest.

● The level of reporting and the stylistic writing both work to reveal a world that is at once “always with us,” public and hidden.


Week Nine - 29

● That is the role of literature, and it has never been more important than now in sports.

● The key lessons to take from this week are that detailed reporting requires an observational eye, a knowledge of history and the capacity to find historical and personal connections in the stories we pursue.

JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Nine Lecture

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Transcript of JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Nine Lecture