JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Nine Lecture

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

Week Nine - 1
● This week, we launch into The Only Game in Town:
Sportswriting from The New Yorker.
● There are a total of 13 factual articles that must be read
for the week.
● Among the selections are two of the all-time greats.

Week Nine - 2
● The two are: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” by John Updike
and “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee.
● Both are known for the stylistic portrayal of the subject
and level of detail in the storytelling, which are the
hallmarks of literature. Spend time with all of the works
but really luxuriate in the writing contained in these two.

Week Nine - 3
● The selections open with Roger Angell, whose work
“The Interior Stadium” opened the semester.
● Angell’s “The Web of the Game” (1981) focuses on a
college pitching duel between Yale’s Ron Darling and
Frank Viola of St. John’s amid an extended
conversation with old-time great Smoky Joe Wood.

Week Nine - 4
● Angell’s work is an appropriate opening to this
sequence because he shows how to connect the past,
the present and future through a game, hence the title.
● In this case, he connects a May 1981 college game in
New Haven with a September 1912 game at Fenway
Park.

Week Nine - 5
● That sets the tone for the holistic, literary approach to
sports that works, even in the contemporary world of
tweets and fantasy leagues.
● In a literary sense, sports is a continuum, with seasons
building on seasons and contemporary players standing
in context with historical, heroic figures and games.

Week Nine - 6
● A.J. Liebling’s “Ahab and Nemesis” (1995) brings a
startling proposition to the table in the piece about the
boxer Archie Moore.
● “What would Moby-Dick be if Ahab and succeeded?
Just another fish story.”

Week Nine - 7
● “The thing that is eternally diverting is the struggle of
man against history – or what Albert Camus, who used
to be an amateur middleweight, has called the Myth of
Sisyphus,” he wrote.
● That struggle of man against history is an important
theme coursing through sports literature.

Week Nine - 8
● Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1960) describes in
exquisite detail the last game of Ted Williams at
Fenway Park.
● It contains one of the most iconic sentences in factual
literature: “Gods do not answer letters.”

Week Nine - 9
● “The Only Games in Town” by Anthony Lane (2008) is a
detailed report on the Beijing Olympics and how the
experience is dramatically different at the venues than it
is at home watching the network broadcast.
● “What NBC chooses to broadcast is not the Olympic
Games,” he writes.

Week Nine - 10
● Bill Barich’s “Race Track” (1980) is a factual account
from off-track betting and track sites that exquisitely
details the patrons.
● “They were intent, blind to their surroundings, and they
all looked terrific, at least until the first race had gone
off. Optimism put a bloom on every cheek.”

Week Nine - 11
● “A Sense of Where You Are” by John McPhee (1965)
and about Bill Bradley is factual sports literature at its
best.
● It marks the moment in sports writing where athletes
could be presented as whole people, not heroic
caricatures (think of the fictional Merriwell), in the
context of deep and detailed reporting.

Week Nine - 12
● The opening description of the Princeton gym sets the
tone and serves as an example of how sportswriters
can deploy sharp observational detail beyond the
ordinary to carry the reader into a story.
● That narrative technique is evident throughout the work.

Week Nine - 13
● “Nonetheless, he does make something of a spectacle
of himself when he moves in rapidly parallel to the
baseline, glides through the air with his back to the
basket, looks for a teammate he can pass to, and,
finding none, tosses the ball into the basket over one
shoulder, like a pinch of salt.”

Week Nine - 14
● “El Unico Matador” by Lillian Ross (1949) serves to
stretch the range of factual reporting into bullfighting in
Spain and Mexico.
● This piece is a profile of Sidney Franklin, the only U.S.
citizen to secure global fame as a bullfighter. She
ranged off the well-trod path of U.S. sports to find him.

Week Nine - 15
● Interestingly, Ross connects Franklin to the fictional
bullfighter of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which
we explored in the context of the Sports Ritual Hero.
● As it turns out, Franklin knew Hemingway, Ross
reveals.

Week Nine - 16
● She quotes Franklin: “ ‘Ernest taught me how to put
people into two categories,” he says. “One the good
guys, and two, the bastards. If you’re a good guy,
anything goes. If not, I don’t want to be around you.’ “

Week Nine - 17
● “Net Worth” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., (1998) reports
on Michael Jordan and his life as both a legendary
basketball player and corporate spokesperson.
● Gates’ list of Jordan’s endorsements serves to reveal
the depth to which the basketball players had infiltrated
American corporate and commercial life.

Week Nine - 18
● Gates points out that Jordan represents the “winner-
take-all celebrity” that represents the overall economic
battle underway in the U.S.
● That shows how sport is merely a platform for a larger
commercial space athletes now inhabit.

Week Nine - 19
● “Michael Jordan has become the greatest corporate
pitchman of all time. As a twentieth-century sports hero,
he has plausible competition from Babe Ruth and
Muhammad Ali; as an agent of brand equity, he is
without peer,” Gates writes.

Week Nine - 20
● Michael Specter’s “The Long Ride” (2002) provides
access to another world ignored by everyday
sportswriting: pro cycling.
● Specter’s attention to the physical demands of the sport
is exceptional as he tells the story of Lance Armstrong.

Week Nine - 21
● “Born Slippy” by John Seabrook (1998) further enlarges
our perspective of sports literature as it profiles figure
skater Michelle Kwan.
● “They’re like sixteen-year-olds going on thirty-eight,”
Seabrook writes of figure skaters.

Week Nine - 22
● “The Chosen One” by David Owen (2000) is a
penetrating look at the rise of Tiger Woods, with
detailed information on his parents and his knowledge
of the history of the game.
● Importantly, the story reveals how Woods’ “views about
race are attractively complicated.”

Week Nine - 23
● Alva Johnston’s “Legend of a Sport” (1950) recounts the
story of Wilson Mizner, a boxing manager who
understood the seedy underside to the sport and
profited because of that.
● Yet the story is much more important than that as the
following excerpt reveals:

Week Nine - 24
● “Nineteen hundred and nine was the big year of the
White Hopes. The barrooms were the chief intellectual
centers of the country at the time, and it was their
despairing conviction that the long career of the fair-
skinned peoples had ended with the defeat of Tommy
Burns by Jack Johnson in 1908.”

Week Nine - 25
● Rebecca Mead’s “A Man Child in Lotusland” (2002) is a
profile of Shaquille O’Neal, covering the period when he
played for the Los Angeles Lakers.
● Mead describes Shaq this way: “He offers a
combination of cartoonish playfulness and wholesome
values.”

Week Nine - 26
● Throughout the piece, Mead shows that the
combination stands opposite of Michael Jordan’s public
persona, and as a result, O’Neal is unique.
● She also shows how shifts in basketball marketing
created the platform for O’Neal to succeed.

Week Nine - 27
● “The growth of professional basketball over the past
twenty-odd years from a relatively minor spectator sport
to a mass-cultural phenomenon is an example of the
way in which all of American culture is increasingly
geared to the tastes of teenage boys … Nikes aren’t
cool all over the world because Vince Carter wears
them but because cool American teenagers wear them.”

Week Nine - 28
● Each of the 13 works in Parts One and Two reflect
factual sports literature at its finest.
● The level of reporting and the stylistic writing both work
to reveal a world that is at once “always with us,” public
and hidden.

Week Nine - 29
● That is the role of literature, and it has never been more
important than now in sports.
● The key lessons to take from this week are that detailed
reporting requires an observational eye, a knowledge of
history and the capacity to find historical and personal
connections in the stories we pursue.

JRN573DE - Sports Literature: Week Nine Lecture

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