JRN 573DE - Sports Literature: Week Five Lecture

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

Week Five - 1
● This week we read Messenger, Part IV: The Modern
Ritual Sports Hero.
● This section is critical to an understanding of how
literature and by extension sportswriting have created
and then dismissed these long-standing
characterizations of sports figures covered to date.

Week Five - 2
● The fourth and final section of Messenger’s work is the
most difficult without direct knowledge of the works of
Hemingway and Faulkner, two writers who are
considered among the finest in U.S. history.
● They were not sportswriters in the modern sense, but
Hemingway’s influence is still with us in part.

Week Five - 3
● Nevertheless, their work as summarized by Messenger
is essential for understanding the depth of sports
heroes in the modern age and all that it demands.
● What does the modern age demand? It wants its heroes
to do the impossible but according to external terms set
by commercial demands and fans.

Week Five - 4
● The modern age demands that heroes perform for the
enjoyment of the spectator while showing themselves to
be accessible people who share the same values as the
fans.

Week Five - 5
● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero, however, rejects that
assumption by the spectator, as the works of
Hemingway and Faulkner suggest in the context of the
characters who populate their work (who are not typical
athletes according to the present experience of
spectators who think primarily of what they see on
television.)

Week Five - 6
● The following slides show the distinction between the
Modern Ritual Sports Hero and the other two figures
studied to date in class.

Week Five - 7
● Popular Sports Hero: Performed for the spectator and
delivered whatever the spectator sought from the
experience.
● School Sports Hero: A greatly diminished type by now,
this figure sought to replicate the brain/brawn/valorous
virtues of a military figure, humble but confident.

Week Five - 8
● The Popular Sports Hero and the School Sports Hero
are direct reflections of the industrialization of the
United States in the 19th century were constructed by
newspaper, book and magazine writers and late in film.

Week Five - 9
● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero stood as a throwback to
a pre-industrial heroic ideal.
● Both Hemingway and Faulkner belittled popular and
school sports hero but held the ritual sports hero in
reverence.

Week Five - 10
● And it’s here where sports become something more real
and hence more sacred, according to Messenger’s
reading of the novels by Hemingway and Faulkner.

Week Five - 11
● Hemingway is more closely tied to Cooper and Thoreau
in his portrayal of personal experience through play and
games.
● Faulkner, on the hand, falls more in line with
Hawthorne’s view of play as a necessary and important
ritual.

Week Five - 12
● Messenger wrote that because of this leap back in time,
Hemingway and Faulkner cut against the grain of sports
during the 20th century.
● The characters in their stories are “adept and self-
sufficient in all the tasks associated with their rites.”
(233)

Week Five - 13
● What Hemingway and Faulkner sought was authenticity
at a time (first half of the 20th century) when authenticity
was in retreat under an onslaught of modernity.
● They found authenticity in the solitary sports figure,
whether it is a bullfighter (Hemingway) or hunter
(Faulkner).

Week Five - 14
● That’s not to say they offered nostalgic portrayals of
characters. Hemingway’s bullfight in The Sun Also
Rises participates in a highly organized spectacle not
unlike that of American football.
● But Hemingway and Faulkner present their strongest
characters as solitary forces.

Week Five - 15
● Hemingway disliked team sports, particularly football,
which he criticized because of the volume of rules
controlling the action of the players. (238)
● He created admirable characters (to him) who were
“physically exposed to the natural world or to danger in
the enclosed arena.” (239).

Week Five - 16
● In short, Hemingway liked outdoorsmen and bullfighters
and boxers.
● Interestingly, Hemingway places the action outside the
United States for the most, because he saw sport as a
universal metaphor for life, not something specific to the
American experience.

Week Five - 17
● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero was one whose
“elemental experience is lost in only simulated conflict
and danger.” (239)
● That is a critical distinction, one that expands our
definition of what sport means to people who observe
and write about it.

Week Five - 18
● Hemingway “infused the idea of competition with a
lasting sense of the individual’s struggle as a Ritual
Sports Hero.” (240).
● This clarity of vision made Hemingway into one of the
finest writers of sports literature, one whose work all
sportswriters need to read.

Week Five - 19
● Faulkner’s approach is more difficult to locate in his
dense prose but the Modern Ritual Sports Hero
emerges time and time again.
● In short, Faulkner wrote about sport and ritual as
necessary components of individual life but with goals
that could never be fully attained.

Week Five - 20
● Ultimately, an analysis of the works of Hemingway and
Faulkner generates a conclusion that both writers say
the Modern Ritual Sports Hero as who craved freedom
of action and freedom of consequence more than
material rewards.
● The actions of their characters suggest powerful forces.

Week Five - 21
● The most powerful force is compressed in a single term:
“agon.”
● Agon is a word from classical Greek that essentially
means total commitment to the struggle that can be
framed in sacred terms.

Week Five - 22
● That leads to the question of whether it is possible in an
age where “sports is always with us” to observe an
athlete who is practicing total commitment in real terms
to something sacred.
● Is the Modern Ritual Sports Hero as Hemingway and
Faulkner defined it around today? That’s hard to say.

Week Five - 23
● Interestingly, Derek Jeter’s post-baseball career is
focused on publishing the innermost thoughts of
athletes through a site called The Players Tribune.
● To date, it is clear that the athletes whose
autobiographical pieces are posted on that site see
themselves as Modern Ritual Sports Heroes.

Week Five - 24
● But the public generally does not see athletes as
Modern Ritual Sports Heroes.
● The media also tend to see athletes as people who are
not engaged in a sacred calling.

Week Five - 25
● It’s fair to state that the total commercialization of high-
level collegiate sports has ushered away the traditional
School Sports Hero.
● And it seems the same can be said of the Modern Ritual
Sports Hero based on mainstream coverage, where
individualistic athletes are marginalized.

Week Five - 26
● That would apparently leave us only with the Popular
Sports Hero among the trio of figures created by
American literature.
● Yet writers who practice outside of sports are still
finding examples of the other two sports figures, as we
will learn as we dive into the anthology in two weeks.

Week Five - 27
● And as noted earlier, the athletes self-define as Modern
Ritual Sports Heroes than as Popular Sports Heroes.
● It is now up to sportswriters to determine how to
generate that characterization, and it helps to know that
what appears to be obvious may not be based on our
readings to date.

JRN 573DE - Sports Literature: Week Five Lecture

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