JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Three

JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Spring 2015/ Week Three

Week Three - 1
● This week we read Messenger, Part II: The Popular
Sports Hero.
● The week in the aftermath of the Super Bowl is an
appropriate time to see how writers originated the
concept of the figure in the 19th century.

Week Three - 2
● That means we can trace the literary antecedents of
today’s sports coverage of popular athletes to a period
populated by what Messenger describes as the “frontier
roarer” who later in the 19th century became the modern
professional sports athlete as defined by literature.

Week Three - 3
● The frontier heroes of the 19th century tended to emerge
from work performed by strong physically uninhibited
men and by “misfit gamesters” as Messenger states.
● The literary figure thus reflected a hero surviving in a
threatening environment, the classic role of a person
overcoming obstacles to win.

Week Three - 4
● The first Popular Sports Hero of profound legend as
created by writers: Davy Crockett, later immortalized in
a 20th century Disney book and a film as “king of the
wild frontier” (1955).

Week Three - 5
Davy Crockett

Week Three - 6
● The narrative arc of Crockett’s life reflect the particulars
evident in contemporary sports literature.
● His exploits were physically demanding and he
presented a personality that could be packaged and
sold by literary types.

Week Three - 7
● Accounts of Crockett in the popular press of the period
reveal that he fought alligators and bears and fought
frontier “enemies” as defined by the white settlers.
● These included native Americans and Mexicans, who
were under assault by the American drive to command
the continent.

Week Three - 8
● Crockett was killed at the Alamo in 1836, cementing his
legacy as a hero.
● Messenger found that a year after his death he was
commemorated as a sportsman, naturalist and traveler.
● In other words, he carried “something for every reader.”

Week Three - 9
● “ … Crockett is a buoyant, mature fighter, who
sometimes uses a rifle but most often literally takes
matters (and animals and men) into his own hands,
shaking sense into adversaries.” – Messenger (67)

Week Three - 10
● In effect, writers created this persona by first inventing
the legend and transmitting it across newspapers,
books and magazines.
● Thus the first recognizable Popular Sports Hero
emerges from a combo platter of fact and fiction.

Week Three - 11
● That established a literary template for others to follow,
all with similar elements based in large measure on
physical courage and defiant personalities.
● Technology and the emergence of team sports would
generate new platforms to apply that template and
deploy the Popular Sports Figure as the centerpiece.

Week Three - 12
● The industrialization of America after the Civil War led
to the creation of a new order of things based on the
machine.
● The machine, in turn, transformed sports from the
individual to the team. Individual craftwork gave way to
mass assembly.

Week Three - 13
● For print media (books, newspapers and magazines),
the development of the rotary press brought mass
production techniques to information, creating the need
to create stories that people would pay to read.

Week Three - 14
● “After the Civil War, spectator sports built to the
specifications of industrial society and controlled by
businessmen would replace the spontaneity of frontier
and river sport,” Messenger writes (89)
● Indeed!

Week Three - 15
● This is the period (1860s – 1900) in which both baseball
and football emerge as spectator sports, with baseball
moving quickly to professional-grade in order to make
money for team owners.
● Interestingly, it’s not a writer but a former baseball
player who recognized the profit capacity of sports.

Week Three - 16
● Albert Spalding would use that motivation to create
literary works that served to enhance the heroic while
supporting sales of sporting goods his company
manufactured.
● Spalding’s catalogs/rulebooks were accompanied by a
library of stories of sports heroes boys could admire.

Week Three - 17
● Shortly after the Civil War, sports became a critical
selling point for mass market newspapers in urban
America.
● These papers carrying accounts of sports were
distributed throughout America by trains, creating in
effect a national market for sports heroes.

Week Three - 18
● Horse racing, boxing, baseball, college football and
other sports were organized into commercial
operations, fed in part by a body of literature that
presented the heroic to keep people interested.
● The newspapers and promoters all worked to develop
this structure to make money.

Week Three - 19
● The emergence of these Popular Sports Heroes, in turn,
created the fundamental conditions for fictionalized
accounts of these characters.
● The Dime Novel, so-called because its low cost put it in
reach of millions of readers, served as the platform for
embedding the Popular Sports Hero in fictional works.

Week Three - 20
● Characters became formulaic in serve the production of
as many books as possible.
● Sports fit perfectly into this structure, because games
provided action and, most importantly, clear winners
and losers. In other words, a proper ending was
possible.

Week Three - 21
● The key writer who serves as the transition point
between the frontier Popular Sports Hero and the
modern Popular Sports Hero we easily recognize today
is Ring Lardner.
● Lardner wrote in the first three decades of the 20th
century, creating characters that reflected society.

Week Three - 22
Ring Lardner

Week Three - 23
● Lardner’s fictionalized baseball stories, for example,
present a much more modern interpretation of athletes
than that produced by the frontier model and Spalding’s
literary works for boys.

Week Three - 24
● As Messenger points out, Lardner’s stories reflected the
reality of athletes in how they talked and behaved more
so than the sugary versions presented in the 19th
century.
● But Lardner’s characters did retain the 19th century
folksiness common to an earlier period.

Week Three - 25
● “If the American public at this time had any notion of
what the average ballplayer sounded like, what he
thought about, what he did off the field, the chances are
that Lardner’s characters provided the clearest image,”
writes Messenger (111).

Week Three - 26
● Lardner’s stories about sports served an important role
in unifying the sense of a nation and that is evident in
the television ratings today for sports.
● Today, sport provides the largest single audience for a
single program type on television.

Week Three - 27
● The writer Virginia Woolf as quoted by Messenger
reveals great insight into the role of sports literature as
a unifying force:

Week Three - 28
● “It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner’s
stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr.
Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most
difficult problems of the American writer;

Week Three - 29
● “it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for
the diverse activities of a people whom a vast continent
isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him
what society gives his English brother.” (125)

Week Three - 30
● Woolf’s remarks reveal two important aspects of sports
literature as presented by the Popular Sports Hero.

Week Three - 31
● 1) The remark reveals the enormous importance of
sport as a unifying element in a diverse society.
● 2) The remarks reveals the outsized influence media
hold on transmitting and interpreting sport to the wide
public.

Week Three - 32
● Lardner, though, was a critic of that culture, and his
Popular Sports Hero tend to be flawed, comedic or
otherwise less than heroic personalities.
● Yet his types of characters still appear in sports
literature and coverage.

Week Three - 33
● Lardner’s influence is evident on sites that have a
literary sensibility such as Grantland, which has an
often “bemused” take on pro sports.
● Also, think of the many sports follies segments on local
and national television.

Week Three - 34
● In conclusion, the emergence of the Popular Sports
Hero in professional sports is one of the most important
historical periods in U.S. cultural history.
● The trajectory of the hero from the solitary frontier to the
massive stadium reflected shifts in the country itself …

Week Three - 35
● … and indicates the enduring importance of sports
literature today as the professional Popular Sports Hero
remains with us.

JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Three

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