jrn 573de - lecture: week three

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Three


Week Three - 1

● This week we read Messenger, Part II: The Popular Sports Hero.

● The week in the aftermath of the Super Bowl is an appropriate time to see how writers originated the concept of the figure in the 19th century.


Week Three - 2

● That means we can trace the literary antecedents of today’s sports coverage of popular athletes to a period populated by what Messenger describes as the “frontier roarer” who later in the 19th century became the modern professional sports athlete as defined by literature.


Week Three - 3

● The frontier heroes of the 19th century tended to emerge from work performed by strong physically uninhibited men and by “misfit gamesters” as Messenger states.

● The literary figure thus reflected a hero surviving in a threatening environment, the classic role of a person overcoming obstacles to win.


Week Three - 4

● The first Popular Sports Hero of profound legend as created by writers: Davy Crockett, later immortalized in a 20th century Disney book and a film as “king of the wild frontier” (1955).


Week Three - 5

Davy Crockett


Week Three - 6

● The narrative arc of Crockett’s life reflect the particulars evident in contemporary sports literature.

● His exploits were physically demanding and he presented a personality that could be packaged and sold by literary types.


Week Three - 7

● Accounts of Crockett in the popular press of the period reveal that he fought alligators and bears and fought frontier “enemies” as defined by the white settlers.

● These included native Americans and Mexicans, who were under assault by the American drive to command the continent.


Week Three - 8

● Crockett was killed at the Alamo in 1836, cementing his legacy as a hero.

● Messenger found that a year after his death he was commemorated as a sportsman, naturalist and traveler.

● In other words, he carried “something for every reader.”


Week Three - 9

● “ … Crockett is a buoyant, mature fighter, who sometimes uses a rifle but most often literally takes matters (and animals and men) into his own hands, shaking sense into adversaries.” – Messenger (67)


Week Three - 10

● In effect, writers created this persona by first inventing the legend and transmitting it across newspapers, books and magazines.

● Thus the first recognizable Popular Sports Hero emerges from a combo platter of fact and fiction.


Week Three - 11

● That established a literary template for others to follow, all with similar elements based in large measure on physical courage and defiant personalities.

● Technology and the emergence of team sports would generate new platforms to apply that template and deploy the Popular Sports Figure as the centerpiece.


Week Three - 12

● The industrialization of America after the Civil War led to the creation of a new order of things based on the machine.

● The machine, in turn, transformed sports from the individual to the team. Individual craftwork gave way to mass assembly.


Week Three - 13

● For print media (books, newspapers and magazines), the development of the rotary press brought mass production techniques to information, creating the need to create stories that people would pay to read.


Week Three - 14

● “After the Civil War, spectator sports built to the specifications of industrial society and controlled by businessmen would replace the spontaneity of frontier and river sport,” Messenger writes (89)

● Indeed!


Week Three - 15

● This is the period (1860s – 1900) in which both baseball and football emerge as spectator sports, with baseball moving quickly to professional-grade in order to make money for team owners.

● Interestingly, it’s not a writer but a former baseball player who recognized the profit capacity of sports.


Week Three - 16

● Albert Spalding would use that motivation to create literary works that served to enhance the heroic while supporting sales of sporting goods his company manufactured.

● Spalding’s catalogs/rulebooks were accompanied by a library of stories of sports heroes boys could admire.


Week Three - 17

● Shortly after the Civil War, sports became a critical selling point for mass market newspapers in urban America.

● These papers carrying accounts of sports were distributed throughout America by trains, creating in effect a national market for sports heroes.


Week Three - 18

● Horse racing, boxing, baseball, college football and other sports were organized into commercial operations, fed in part by a body of literature that presented the heroic to keep people interested.

● The newspapers and promoters all worked to develop this structure to make money.


Week Three - 19

● The emergence of these Popular Sports Heroes, in turn, created the fundamental conditions for fictionalized accounts of these characters.

● The Dime Novel, so-called because its low cost put it in reach of millions of readers, served as the platform for embedding the Popular Sports Hero in fictional works.


Week Three - 20

● Characters became formulaic in serve the production of as many books as possible.

● Sports fit perfectly into this structure, because games provided action and, most importantly, clear winners and losers. In other words, a proper ending was possible.


Week Three - 21

● The key writer who serves as the transition point between the frontier Popular Sports Hero and the modern Popular Sports Hero we easily recognize today is Ring Lardner.

● Lardner wrote in the first three decades of the 20th century, creating characters that reflected society.


Week Three - 22

Ring Lardner


Week Three - 23

● Lardner’s fictionalized baseball stories, for example, present a much more modern interpretation of athletes than that produced by the frontier model and Spalding’s literary works for boys.


Week Three - 24

● As Messenger points out, Lardner’s stories reflected the reality of athletes in how they talked and behaved more so than the sugary versions presented in the 19th century.

● But Lardner’s characters did retain the 19th century folksiness common to an earlier period.


Week Three - 25

● “If the American public at this time had any notion of what the average ballplayer sounded like, what he thought about, what he did off the field, the chances are that Lardner’s characters provided the clearest image,” writes Messenger (111).


Week Three - 26

● Lardner’s stories about sports served an important role in unifying the sense of a nation and that is evident in the television ratings today for sports.

● Today, sport provides the largest single audience for a single program type on television.


Week Three - 27

● The writer Virginia Woolf as quoted by Messenger reveals great insight into the role of sports literature as a unifying force:


Week Three - 28

● “It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner’s stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer;


Week Three - 29

● “it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for the diverse activities of a people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother.” (125)


Week Three - 30

● Woolf’s remarks reveal two important aspects of sports literature as presented by the Popular Sports Hero.


Week Three - 31

● 1) The remark reveals the enormous importance of sport as a unifying element in a diverse society.

● 2) The remarks reveals the outsized influence media hold on transmitting and interpreting sport to the wide public.


Week Three - 32

● Lardner, though, was a critic of that culture, and his Popular Sports Hero tend to be flawed, comedic or otherwise less than heroic personalities.

● Yet his types of characters still appear in sports literature and coverage.


Week Three - 33

● Lardner’s influence is evident on sites that have a literary sensibility such as Grantland, which has an often “bemused” take on pro sports.

● Also, think of the many sports follies segments on local and national television.


Week Three - 34

● In conclusion, the emergence of the Popular Sports Hero in professional sports is one of the most important historical periods in U.S. cultural history.

● The trajectory of the hero from the solitary frontier to the massive stadium reflected shifts in the country itself …


Week Three - 35

● … and indicates the enduring importance of sports literature today as the professional Popular Sports Hero remains with us.

jrn 573de - lecture: week three

Education

sports literature week

contemporary sports

popular sports figure

sports literature rich

emergence of team sports

popular press

davy crockett

literary figure