This week's reading for the JRN 573 - Sports Literature class focuses on stories from The Only Game in Town that examine sports from a deeper, more human perspective. The stories discuss topics like juiced baseballs in the 1920s, Irish golf courses, tennis personalities, knuckleballs in baseball, and football plays. They provide examples of literary sports writing that reveal the human side of sports compared to more analytical, stats-based approaches today. The readings include works by Ring Lardner, Herbert Warren Wind, Martin Amis, Ben McGrath, and Don DeLillo.

1. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Spring 2015/ Week Eleven

2. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 1
● This week, we read Part Four of The Only Game in
Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.
● There are a total of six factual articles under the
heading A Deeper Game that must be read for the
week.

3. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 2
● As the title of the section suggests, this week’s story
collection - five factual and one fictional - brings the
reader to the interior of sports.
● Among the subjects are juiced baseballs from the late
1920s, Irish golf courses, tennis personalities,
knuckleballs, football plays and failure.

4. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 3
● The stories in this sequence serve as a lesson for
sportswriters who take a literary approach to
explanatory coverage, which is today dominated (for the
moment) by Sports Science and similar approaches that
focus on quantifying performance using vectors and
other data points.
● These stories reveal a more human side to the analysis.

5. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 4
● Part Four opens with a writer we first met earlier in the
semester: Ring Lardner, whose work here “Br’er Rabbit
Ball” was published in 1930.
● File this under the more things change the more they
remain the same in baseball, as Lardner reports on the
possibility of juiced baseballs to attract fans.

6. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 5
● Lardner’s work contains withering passages that
criticize baseball’s “high officials” and describes how a
batted ball that once would have been pop fly “breaks a
window in a synagogue four blocks away.” (349)
● Instead of what constitutes analysis today (data),
Lardner relies on the eyeball test of players.

7. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 6
● “Well, the other day a great ballplayer whom I won’t
name (he holds the home-run record and gets eighty
thousand dollars a year) told a friend of mine in
confidence (so you must keep this under your hat) that
there are at least fifteen outfielders now playing regular
positions in his own league who would not have been
allowed bench-room the year he broke in.” (352)

8. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 7
● “Greens of Ireland” by Herbert Warren Wind (1971)
stands as a literary review of Irish golf courses.
● The story points out that Ireland is “one of the great
golfing lands” and that game on the island knows “no
political boundary,” a reference to the division between
Northern Ireland the Irish Republic in the south.

9. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 8
● Wind surveys the golfing structure of Ireland through a
tour of courses that, points out, are inexpensive to play,
a reason why the game is popular.
● It is possible to read this story today and understand
more fully why Irish golfers such as Rory McIlroy are
major figures on global tours today.

10. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 9
● The work has remained relevant for an other reason:
the description of the golf courses Wind visited and
played.
● Because so little “action” happens in golf – a golfer hits
the ball and walks to hit it or again - writers deploy
literary descriptions of courses to flavor their stories.

11. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 10
● “Nongolfers who scanned this treeless acreage before it
was converted into fairways and greens may well have
found it grim and perhaps forbidding, but it is the kind of
land that stirs a man with a golfer’s eye, and it quite
overwhelmed Harry Colt, the celebrated British golf
architect, when the club brought him in, shortly before
the First World War, to look things over.” (368)

12. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 11
● Emerging sportswriters who go out to cover a game of
any type ought to take a lesson from Wind and seek to
describe the field as it opens up before them to sharpen
that capacity.

13. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 12
● “Tennis Personalities” by Martin Amis (1994) is a brief
tour of tennis players through the years.
● It is known for the last word of the story, one that
perfectly describes many of the stars of the game.
● Amis builds the entire piece to land on that one word.

14. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 13
● “Project Knuckleball” by Ben McGrath (2004) examines
the physical and psychological aspects of the pitch.
● McGrath interviews coaches, pitchers and a scientist
who studies the game, including an immortal quote in
the piece that could be interpreted as launching the
media toward covering the science of sports.

15. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 14
● McGrath quotes Yale physics professor Robert K. Adair:
● “Baseball science isn’t rocket science … It’s a lot
harder.” (380)

16. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 15
● “Game Plan” by Don DeLillo (1971) is a work of fiction
that later appeared in the classic novel End Zone.
● DeLillo’s descriptions of a football game and the players
are remarkable; a left tackle is “an immense and very
geometric of work, about six-seven and two-seventy –
an oblong monument to intimidation.” (393)

17. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 16
● DeLillo attention to detail serves the purpose of
revealing the unknown side of American culture – in this
case, football – to the reader.
● DeLillo uses sport at times as the animating motivation
for his critique of America in the 20th century in his
novels.

18. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 17
● The opening sequence of Underworld, for example,
focuses on Bobby Thomson’s home run in 1951 that
lifted the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers
the pennant in a playoff game for the National League
pennant.

19. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 18
● DeLillo is someone all writers should read. Sportswriters
can learn much from his precision of language and
descriptions.
● More than that, they can learn much about the role of
sport in American culture without reading sports books.

20. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 19
● The “Art of Failure” by Malcolm Gladwell marks a
turning point in coverage of sports.
● Gladwell is widely known for revealing the importance of
things that may be too obvious to notice amid the noise
of everyday life.

21. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 20
● In this work, failure – choking, as some would write - is
something that happens all the time in sports. He writes,
● “ … there are clearly cases when how failure happens is
central to understanding why failure happens.”

22. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 21
● Among other things, Gladwell examines why Greg
Norman failed to win the 1996 Masters golf tournament
despite holding a significant lead late in the tournament.
● He brings up a point that is important to recognize the
importance of spectators in the process of choking.

23. JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Week Eleven - 21
● “We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance
reflects not the innate ability to the performer but the
complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor
test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good
one.” (409)
● In short, context matters.