jrn 573de - sports literature: week eleven lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Eleven


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


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.


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.


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.


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)


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.


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.


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.


Week Eleven - 14

● McGrath quotes Yale physics professor Robert K. Adair:

● “Baseball science isn’t rocket science … It’s a lot harder.” (380)


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)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.”


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.


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.

jrn 573de - sports literature: week eleven lecture

Education

sports literature week

sports science

interior of sports

sports literature rich

golf courses wind

tour of courses

greens of ireland

northern ireland