jrn 573de - lecture: week twelve

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Twelve


Week Twelve - 1

● This week, we read Part Five of The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker. It is the final part of the anthology.

● There are a total of seven articles under the heading Out of Left Field that must be read for the week.


Week Twelve - 2

● As the title of the section suggests, this week’s story collection takes the reader to places beyond the ordinary.

● Among the subjects are sharks, catching a ball in the stands, snowmobiling, the Iditarod, basketball in China, an extreme new sport, and a horse put out to stud.


Week Twelve - 3

● The stories in this sequence how that fresh ideas and perspectives yield terrific results in terms of storytelling.

● A misperception exists that sports fans care only about short bursts of information, generally laden with statistics. That’s not true. People want to stories, as the rise of long-form sports writing shows online.


Week Twelve - 4

● Part Five opens with a work by Charles Sprawson titled “Swimming with Sharks.” (1999)

● The article focuses on Lynne Cox, a 5-foot-6 swimmer.

● Interestingly, Sprawson first interviewed Cox while both swam.


Week Twelve - 5

● The story shows how Cox has swam the great crossings of our day, often in waters infested with sharks.

● Cox is quoted as saying that swimming in a cage as some do is “like climbing Everest on an escalator.” (422)


Week Twelve - 6

● Cox swam the Cook Strait in New Zealand in 1975, becoming as she understood it to “become a symbolic figure.” (424).

● That shows the modern ritual sports hero in action, only this time blending with a new form, one that includes political or social activism.


Week Twelve - 7

● “The National Pastime” is a short fictional story by John Cheever (1953). It reveals the subject’s troubled relationship with baseball from an unexpected perspective: he hid from the game as a youth, fearful of his father.

● This hardly Field of Dreams stuff.


Week Twelve - 8

● “To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim,” Cheever opens as he sets the framework of the story. (428)

● Things regarding baseball go down from there until the very end of the article.


Week Twelve - 9

● Cheever is considered on the great American writers of the 20th century.

● The story also appears in anthologies of great American short stories, underscoring its role beyond sports in revealing the darker side of sporting culture with great wit and stylistic writing.


Week Twelve - 10

● Calvin Trillen’s “SNO” (1970) takes reveals the world of snowmobile racing in great detail and humor.

● Trillen writes, “Snowmobiling has been marketed not as a sport but as a culture – a way to turn the former hibernation period into a time of what snowmobile marketers often to as Family Fun.” (446)


Week Twelve - 11

● Trillen concisely documents that culture, including a passage about snowmobilers cruising from bar to bar.

● Trillen covers the story from his perspective as an urban sophisticate, but he is not shy to criticize his own crowd for professing conservationist values only to undermine them with personal action.


Week Twelve - 12

● “Musher” by Susan Orlean (1987) was published just as the Iditarod pushed its way into the pop culture swirl, transforming Ritual Sports Heroes to Popular Sports Heroes virtually overnight as cable sports networks and nightly news programs found it to contain the elements of spectacle.


Week Twelve - 13

● The story opens with the subject, Susan Butcher, attending an awards ceremony in New York.

● It’s the classic fish-out-of-water opening, with the frontier hero confronting the big city.


Week Twelve - 14

● What makes this short article of great interest to us in this sequence is in comparison to the frontier heroes referenced by Messenger.

● The frontier sports heroes of the past were men; by 1987, women had shouldered their way into the ritual sports hero category.


Week Twelve - 15

● “Home and Away” by Peter Hessler (2003) takes as its subject the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming.

● In revealing Ming’s personality, Hessler reveals the distinction between China and America regarding sports, as the following quote from Yao makes clear:


Week Twelve - 16

● “ ‘I want people in China to know that part of why I play basketball is simply personal. In the eyes of Americans, if I fail then I fail. It’s just me. But for the Chinese if I fail then that means that thousands of other people fail along with me. They feel as if I’m representing them.’ “ (469)


Week Twelve - 17

● That distinction should not be lost on sports writers covering an increasingly globalized culture circulating through and around sports.

● The story shows how sports writers can operate most effectively by understanding these distinctions.


Week Twelve - 18

● Alec Wilkerson’s “No Obstacles” (2007) is an explanation of Parkour, an emerging sport made popular by YouTube videos of athletes navigating natural and urban obstacles such as rooftops and walls.

● The article shows the importance of the internet to the development of these emerging extreme sports.


Week Twelve - 19

● More than anything, the article points to the future of sports writing.

● Bringing the internet mantra to its literal point – pics or it didn’t happen – the role of the literary writer will be to provide the context to the extreme sports millions view in digestible chunks online – and try to copy in real life.


Week Twelve - 20

● “A Stud’s Life” by Kevin Conley (2000) closes the anthology, and its title reflects its content without apology.

● It is the story about horse racing’s most prized possession – a stallion with long-term prospects for impregnating mares.


Week Twelve - 21

● That story reveals the process, the security, the risk and other elements to breeding champion thoroughbreds.

● The level of detail is extraordinary but required to tell the full story.

● And that is the ultimate lesson of the anthology.


Week Twelve - 22

● Sports writers need to go much deeper in finding subjects to cover.

● By adopting a literary approach, taking each story as an epic in an of itself, sports writers will find that details and observations of the highest order can take their readers to places that cannot be found elsewhere.

jrn 573de - lecture: week twelve

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