JRN573DE - Lecture Six

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

Week Six - 1
● This week, the focus is on a comparative analysis of
two works concerning a fictional Yale football player and
a fictional Princeton player portrayed in different works.
● To be sure, the readership for each is different but our
job this week is to illustrate the trajectory and changing
shape of the sports hero from one era to another.

Week Six - 2
● The works are 1903’s Frank Merriwell at Yale by Burt
Standish, the pen name of Gilbert Patten, and the 1928
magazine fictional article “The Bowl” by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby.

Week Six - 3
● Patten worked in the dime-store novel genre that
Messenger presents in his book. These works would be
released on a scheduled of once a week.
● Merriwell portrayed a School Sports Hero type under
Messenger’s categorization of American athletic heroes.

Week Six - 4
● Merriwell combined brains and brawns in the classic
School Sports Hero way, always winning in the end
after overcoming personal obstacles.
● Merriwell is the key character in some 245 novels,
transforming the fictional athlete into the most popular
hero of the dime-store genre.

Week Six - 5
● “The most truly American hero ever created,” is how the
publisher of a 1972 reprint of Merriwell stories, Jack
Rudman, described the character.
● President Ronald Reagan listed “Frank Merriwell at
Yale” as one of his favorite books, underscoring
Rudman’s point.

Week Six - 6
● Each week, a fresh Merriwell story would sell 200,000
copies throughout the United States (more than the
Bible), embedding the structure of the School Sports
Hero into the everyday life of young readers.
● These children would later grow into the generation of
fans who propelled football’s golden age in the 1920s.

Week Six - 7
● Patten’s creation of Merriwell is one of the most
significant developments in sports literature, because
he showed that Americans wanted sports heroes of the
kind represented by Merriwell’s projection of the School
Sports Hero.

Week Six - 8
● Merriwell set the template for the heroes portrayed in
films about college life that began flowing from
Hollywood in the 1920s.
● Between 1926 and 1941, some 115 movies based on
college athletes (mostly football), screened in U.S.
theaters.

Week Six - 9
● That shows the reach and media influence of the
Merriwell School Sports Hero type.
● And the combination of the books and films created
what many people who did not attend college imagined
college life to be like.

Week Six - 10
● That’s important to note, because less than 20 percent
of Americans had attended college up until the
aftermath of World War II.
● Most sportswriters likewise did not attend college, and
thus it became natural for the press – and filmmakers –
to go with a mythological vision of the school hero.

Week Six - 11
● "Frank Merriwell at Yale” is typical of Patten’s work and,
as such, represents how millions of Americans and the
media interpreted how the college football hero was
expected to act.
● Here’s how one reviewer from Book Review Digest
described the 1903 work:

Week Six - 12
● “Little that fills the life of a college youth of today is
missing from this spirited tale. Frank Merriwell is made
of true stuff, and with manly courage dominates every
situation unexpected and prearranged” he confronts.

Week Six - 13
● That accurately describes the work, as Merriwell finds
himself confronted with obstacles and finds a way to
overcome each with grace and dignity of the kind
expected of a School Sports Hero.

Week Six - 14
● “The Bowl,” on other hand, appears 25 years after
Frank Merriwell at Yale and shows just how far the
literary portrayal of sports shifted.
● As notes earlier, the Merriwell stories are for younger
readers, but the Saturday Evening Post, where “The
Bowl” appears, is a general magazine, for everybody.

Week Six - 15
● "The Bowl” focuses on a player named Dolly Harlan
who at first seemingly characteristics of the Modern
Ritual Sports Hero, and the Popular Sports Hero and
the School Sports Hero.
● Harlan at first doesn’t buy into the college hero game.
As described by Fitzgerald, Harlan:

Week Six - 16
● “ … hated the long, dull period of training, the element
of personal conflict, the demand on his time, the
monotony of the routine and the nervous apprehension
of disaster just before the end.”
● But over the course of the narrative, Harlan comes
around.

Week Six - 17
● "He worried; that terrible sense of responsibility was at
work. Once he had hated the mention of football; now
he thought and talked of nothing else,” the narrator
states. We soon discover that he is above others.
● In a passage that defines the distinction between
players and fans, the narrator writes:

Week Six - 18
● "The actual day of the game was, as usual, like a
dream--unreal with its crowds of friends and relatives
and the inessential trappings of a gigantic show. The
eleven little men who ran out on the field at last were
like bewitched figures in another world, strange and
infinitely romantic, blurred by a throbbing mist of people
and sound …

Week Six - 19
● “One aches with them intolerably, trembles with their
excitement, but they have no traffic with us now, they
are beyond help, consecrated and unreachable--
vaguely holy.”

Week Six - 20
● Harlan makes a big play in the big game, and afterward,
we discover he is a Modern Ritual Sports Hero.
● After the game, he walks alone on the field, “feeling the
crumbled turf with his shoe.”

Week Six - 21
● Then, he does this in the concluding passage:

Week Six - 22
● “Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it
for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would
not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive
the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow
in his heart that was best of all …

Week Six - 23
● “ … Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he
moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate
ahead of him or the small chatter behind.”

Week Six - 24
● He had decided to go upstairs to the hotel room of a
woman, which is something Frank Merriwell would
never consider.
● In short, Harlan no longer cared about the past or the
future, only the present.

Week Six - 25
● A Popular Sports Hero would have sought to capitalize
on the fame.
● A School Sports Hero would have returned to campus
for a dance.
● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero is oblivious to fate.

Week Six - 26
● And in many ways, Dolly Harlan thus becomes the first
authentically modern sports hero, dismantling the
college mythology of the traditional past and the
possibilities of a corporate future brimming with fame
and fortune.
● He lives in the moment.

Week Six - 27
● Ultimately, the definitions of sports heroes remain fixed
in the three categories identified by Messenger in his
research into texts that featured American games, play
and sports in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Week Six - 29
● Within those fixed categories, though, athletes can shift
as they mature or as the society and culture around
them change.
● The cultural realm Frank Merriwell occupied emerged
from the traditional ways of the 19th century; that of
Dolly Harlan emerged in the modern 1920s.

Week Six - 30
● Either way, sportswriters who cover athletes today will
find themselves writing either about the Frank Merriwell
type or the Dolly Harlan type or something in between.
● It’s important to note that these types emerged from the
minds of the greatest writers in American history, linking
sports to the country in a fundamental way.

JRN573DE - Lecture Six

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JRN573DE - Lecture Six