jrn573de - lecture six

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Six


Week Six - 1

● This week, the focus is on a comparative analysis of two works concerning a fictional Yale football player and a fictional Princeton player portrayed in different works.

● To be sure, the readership for each is different but our job this week is to illustrate the trajectory and changing shape of the sports hero from one era to another.


Week Six - 2

● The works are 1903’s Frank Merriwell at Yale by Burt Standish, the pen name of Gilbert Patten, and the 1928 magazine fictional article “The Bowl” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby.


Week Six - 3

● Patten worked in the dime-store novel genre that Messenger presents in his book. These works would be released on a scheduled of once a week.

● Merriwell portrayed a School Sports Hero type

under Messenger’s categorization of American athletic heroes.


Week Six - 4

● Merriwell combined brains and brawns in the classic School Sports Hero way, always winning in the end after overcoming personal obstacles.

● Merriwell is the key character in some 245 novels, transforming the fictional athlete into the most popular hero of the dime-store genre.


Week Six - 5

● “The most truly American hero ever created,” is how the publisher of a 1972 reprint of Merriwell stories, Jack Rudman, described the character.

● President Ronald Reagan listed “Frank Merriwell

at Yale” as one of his favorite books, underscoring Rudman’s point.


Week Six - 6

● Each week, a fresh Merriwell story would sell 200,000 copies throughout the United States (more than the Bible), embedding the structure of the School Sports Hero into the everyday life of young readers.

● These children would later grow into the generation of fans who propelled football’s golden age in the 1920s.


Week Six - 7

● Patten’s creation of Merriwell is one of the most significant developments in sports literature, because he showed that Americans wanted sports heroes of the kind represented by Merriwell’s projection of the School Sports Hero.


Week Six - 8

● Merriwell set the template for the heroes portrayed in films about college life that began flowing from Hollywood in the 1920s.

● Between 1926 and 1941, some 115 movies based on college athletes (mostly football), screened in U.S. theaters.


Week Six - 9

● That shows the reach and media influence of the Merriwell School Sports Hero type.

● And the combination of the books and films created what many people who did not attend college imagined college life to be like.


Week Six - 10

● That’s important to note, because less than 20 percent of Americans had attended college up until the aftermath of World War II.

● Most sportswriters likewise did not attend college, and thus it became natural for the press – and filmmakers – to go with a mythological vision of the school hero.


Week Six - 11

● "Frank Merriwell at Yale” is typical of Patten’s work and, as such, represents how millions of Americans and the media interpreted how the college football hero was expected to act.

● Here’s how one reviewer from Book Review Digest described the 1903 work:


Week Six - 12

● “Little that fills the life of a college youth of today is missing from this spirited tale. Frank Merriwell is made of true stuff, and with manly courage dominates every situation unexpected and prearranged” he confronts.


Week Six - 13

● That accurately describes the work, as Merriwell finds himself confronted with obstacles and finds a way to overcome each with grace and dignity of the kind expected of a School Sports Hero.


Week Six - 14

● “The Bowl,” on other hand, appears 25 years after Frank Merriwell at Yale and shows just how far the literary portrayal of sports shifted.

● As notes earlier, the Merriwell stories are for younger readers, but the Saturday Evening Post, where “The Bowl” appears, is a general magazine, for everybody.


Week Six - 15

● "The Bowl” focuses on a player named Dolly Harlan who at first seemingly characteristics of the Modern Ritual Sports Hero, and the Popular Sports Hero and the School Sports Hero.

● Harlan at first doesn’t buy into the college hero game. As described by Fitzgerald, Harlan:


Week Six - 16

● “ … hated the long, dull period of training, the element of personal conflict, the demand on his time, the monotony of the routine and the nervous apprehension of disaster just before the end.”

● But over the course of the narrative, Harlan comes around.


Week Six - 17

● "He worried; that terrible sense of responsibility was at work. Once he had hated the mention of football; now he thought and talked of nothing else,” the narrator states. We soon discover that he is above others.

● In a passage that defines the distinction between

players and fans, the narrator writes:


Week Six - 18

● "The actual day of the game was, as usual, like a dream--unreal with its crowds of friends and relatives and the inessential trappings of a gigantic show. The eleven little men who ran out on the field at last were like bewitched figures in another world, strange and infinitely romantic, blurred by a throbbing mist of people and sound …


Week Six - 19

● “One aches with them intolerably, trembles with their excitement, but they have no traffic with us now, they are beyond help, consecrated and unreachable--vaguely holy.”


Week Six - 20

● Harlan makes a big play in the big game, and afterward, we discover he is a Modern Ritual Sports Hero.

● After the game, he walks alone on the field, “feeling the crumbled turf with his shoe.”


Week Six - 21

● Then, he does this in the concluding passage:


Week Six - 22

● “Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow in his heart that was best of all …


Week Six - 23

● “ … Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate ahead of him or the small chatter behind.”


Week Six - 24

● He had decided to go upstairs to the hotel room of a woman, which is something Frank Merriwell would never consider.

● In short, Harlan no longer cared about the past or the future, only the present.


Week Six - 25

● A Popular Sports Hero would have sought to capitalize on the fame.

● A School Sports Hero would have returned to campus for a dance.

● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero is oblivious to fate.


Week Six - 26

● And in many ways, Dolly Harlan thus becomes the first authentically modern sports hero, dismantling the college mythology of the traditional past and the possibilities of a corporate future brimming with fame and fortune.

● He lives in the moment.


Week Six - 27

● Ultimately, the definitions of sports heroes remain fixed in the three categories identified by Messenger in his research into texts that featured American games, play and sports in the 19th and early 20th centuries.


Week Six - 29

● Within those fixed categories, though, athletes can shift as they mature or as the society and culture around them change.

● The cultural realm Frank Merriwell occupied emerged from the traditional ways of the 19th century; that of Dolly Harlan emerged in the modern 1920s.


Week Six - 30

● Either way, sportswriters who cover athletes today will find themselves writing either about the Frank Merriwell type or the Dolly Harlan type or something in between.

● It’s important to note that these types emerged from the minds of the greatest writers in American history, linking sports to the country in a fundamental way.

jrn573de - lecture six

Education

sports literature week

sports heroes

sports literature rich

school hero

classic school sports

american hero

s frank merriwell

popular hero