JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Four

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

Week Four - 1
● This week we read Messenger, Part III: The School
Sports Hero.

Week Four - 2
● A quick note on the readings for the week. Messenger
includes material on the fictional Merriwell character
and on work by F. Scott Fitzgerald. We will draw
detailed comparisons between the two in the Week Six
transitional week between Messenger and The New
Yorker Anthology. But make sure to read the
Messenger chapters on these two now.

Week Four - 3
● The School Sports Hero as constructed in the 19th
century represents a figure who played team sports as
part of a process of moving to adulthood and becoming
a leader in the community, representing the idealization
of class, education and power, Messenger writes.

Week Four - 4
● In the aftermath of the Civil War, the School Sports
Hero emerged both to summon the memory of war
dead and to support the notion of competition as
extraordinary training for such leadership.
● Most importantly, it represented an opportunity for elite
citizens to reassert their power in the war’s aftermath.

Week Four - 5
● That’s why the school sports hero emerges from the
late 19th century college campus.
● It is here where the great intersection between sports
and American life at the highest levels of power, social
class and occupation occurs.

Week Four - 6
● In short, sports provided the platform for the creation
and transmission of a cultural identity based on the role
hard work and physical courage played in a reward-
based society whose ultimate goal was success.

Week Four - 7
● As Messenger points out, the 1890s marked the
moment when “sport and society were more closely
integrated” than they would be again.
● The School Sports Hero emerges in all kinds of literary
works in support of the ethos of hard work.

Week Four - 8
● The outcome of that effort is why collegiate sports
remain with us today as a multi-billion-dollar enterprise
that has little to do with education.
● In short, college sports became mythologized during the
1890s as “consistent with what was vital and
spontaneous in American life … “(140).

Week Four - 9
● At the core of this mythology amplified by sports
literature stood team sports.
● Writers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and
Richard Harding Davis notably used their background in
sports for their work.

Week Four - 10
● In his classic The Red Badge of Courage, Crane wrote
about the Civil War, which he did not experience.
● But, he late said, he “got my sense of the rage of
conflict on the football field.”

Week Four - 11
● “The climatic battle scenes of The Red Badge of
Courage at times resemble descriptions of football
action,” Messenger writes (144).
● Football, Messenger writes, served as the “perfect
romantic delusion for a youth in the 1890s, and Crane
posed his … hero as a representative figure.” (144)

Week Four - 12
● Frank Norris likewise promoted the idea of a school
sports hero in a story titled “Travis Hallet’s Halfback.”
● Travis Hallet was published in 1894. The hero is among
the first we can identify as a modern college football
hero, a player comfortable with the easy life of privilege
who turns into a “beast” on the field. (148)

Week Four - 13
● Davis, meanwhile, deepened the School Sports Hero by
writing stories about the college gentleman, a man who
is skilled in the social graces of the wealthy elite but
who can play sports with a certain primitive intensity.

Week Four - 14
● Gilbert Patten built on these figures with a character
named Frank Merriwell.
● The character of Merriwell became “synonymous with
last-second heroics” and that figure persists today with
players such as Tom Brady.

Week Four - 15
● Merriwell operated in an environment of fair play and
teamwork.
● He also served as a role model. He did not swear,
smoke or drink, although he did gamble.
● Merriwell’s greatest strength was self-discipline.

Week Four - 16
● We will read a Merriwell story in two weeks but the
Learning Module for the week includes a radio version
of a Merriwell story to present a sense of the narrative
voice as part of a classic “for the good of the team”
story.
● Think of Merriwell as the School Sports Hero whose
template is followed by writers today.

Week Four - 17
● A Messenger writes, Fitzgerald presented the capacity
to see psychological shading in the School Sports Hero.
● In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald re-creates the
classic School Sports Hero (in the character Allenby)
but in The Great Gatsby, he shows the School Sports
Hero (in Tom Buchanan) as someone less than heroic.

Week Four - 18
● The importance of the material in this segment of
Messenger is to show how the School Sports Hero
figure began and has persisted over more than a
century of sportswriting and sports literature.
● Some of the best writers in American literature (i.e.,
Fitzgerald) used sport as a key element in their work.

Week Four - 19
● That showed how the importance of sport to American
culture deepened in the 20th century.
● It also shows how sportswriting in the 21st century
remains dependent on figures created first from the
need to create an idealized hero and then to reflect the
true nature of the athletic experience.

Week Four - 20
● Students interested in pursuing sportswriting or sports
broadcasting as a career need to understand the
antecedents to the figures they cover and that they are
simply reflecting developments that emerged over a 100
years ago.

Week Four - 21
● The School Sports Hero figure is of critical importance
because its idealized version drives much of the
coverage of personalities today and is defined by
coaches and college administrators in much the same
vocabulary as first used in the 1890s.

JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Four

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JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Four