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

Education

sports literatureweek

team sports

college sports

collegiate sports

sports literature jrn

school sports hero

sports literaturerich

messenger writes