jrn573de - sports literature: week ten lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Ten


Week Ten - 1

● This week, we read Part Three of The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.

● There are a total of six factual articles under the heading Personal Best that must be read for the week.

● All include first-person accounts as part of the work.


Week Ten - 2

● The use of first-person in these sports stories from outside the mainstream of coverage shows how the modern sports ritual hero is often embedded in the person who writes the stories and who admires others who participate in the action for reasons outside of money or popularity.


Week Ten - 3

● The stories in this sequence focus on mountain skiing, amateur running, Ping-Pong, surfing, coaching a youth football team and a fantasy football team consisting entirely of the writer playing all positions.


Week Ten - 4

● Part Three opens with “Dangerous Game” by Nick Paumgarten (2005).

● The work spins around a profile of Andrew Magnum, who skis in wild terrain, the dangerous game of the title.

● Paumgarten’s story focuses on that nature of the sport.


Week Ten - 5

● The story includes passages of the writer’s personal connection to the dangers of avalanches. His aunt died in one, for example.

● It is that connection between his personal experience and the story of Magnum and the science of snow that reveals the underlying theme of man v. nature.


Week Ten - 6

● “The more you learn about snow, the clearer it becomes that skiing – in the backcountry, on glaciers, in deep snow, on extreme steps – is more dangerous that most people who regularly do it acknowledge,” writes Paumgarten. (281)


Week Ten - 7

● “The Running Novelist” by Haruki Murakami (2008) is an autobiographical article about the transition of the writer from a club owner to a novelist who also runs a lot.


Week Ten - 8

● In the piece, Murakami describes the moment he became a novelist.

● It happened while he watched a baseball game.


Week Ten - 9

● “I still remember the wide-open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and, whatever is was, I accepted it.” (287)


Week Ten - 10

● He also describes the writing life:

● “The best thing about becoming a professional writer was I could go to bed early and get up early.” (290)

● He also began to run everyday, hence the title of the piece.


Week Ten - 11

● In short, Murakami is not only chronicling his experiences, he is also describing without using the category the life of a ritual sports hero, one who would be favored by Hemingway.


Week Ten - 12

● Nancy Franklin’s “Back to the Basement” (2003) is a rollicking account of Ping-Pong and the national championship of the sport.

● That’s right. Even a recreational game is a legitimate subject for sportswriting as long as the story is rich in detail and meaning – and, in this case, fun.


Week Ten - 13

● “Here’s the thing, though: I really wasn’t very good,” Franklin writes about her Ping-Pong experience. “I was.. .OK… Sort of. Other amateur athletes dream of being better than they are, but a peculiar trait of basement Ping-Pong players is that they think they’re better than they are.” (297)


Week Ten - 14

● “Playing Doc’s Games” by William Finnegan (1992) is about surfing and the ritualistic approach favored by the writer toward the sport.

● One passage toward the end of the article reveals how the pursuit of solitary excellence is almost impossible to do, in a moment Hemingway would appreciate:


Week Ten - 15

● “Surfing wasn’t supposed to be about one’s standing in a company – about caste. In fact, I had spent years slogging through the tropical backwaters in search of empty surf, looking for the purest possible encounter with the remotest possible waves. Still, some dogged essence of common vanity, of grubby society, followed me everywhere.” (323)


Week Ten - 16

● “Adam Gopnik’s “Last of the Metrozoids” (2004) is a surprising story ostensibly about coaching youth football but the meaning extends into the nature of existence itself and mortality.

● There is a passage (about the 1984 Flutie pass) that is among the finest ever written in sportswriting.


Week Ten - 17

● “And for one moment he looked as happy as I had ever known him: one more piece of the world’s mysteries demystified without being debunked, a thing legendary and hallowed broken down into the real pattern of human initiative and human weakness and human action that had made it happen.


Week Ten - 18

● “We had been waiting twenty years to see a miracle, and what we saw – what he saw, once again, and showed us – was one more work of art, a pattern made by people out of the possibilities the moment offered to a ready mind. It was no Hail Mary, friends; it was a play you made.” (342)


Week Ten - 19

● The segment for the week closes with “The Sandy Frazier Dream Team” by Ian Frazier (1977).

● This story is not so much a story as a list made by a young man who wants to be big, fast, quick and agile, all at the same time and at each position.


Week Ten - 20

● Frazier’s work is an appreciation of how youth see themselves as football players within the context of humor instead of sentimentality on one hand or cynicism on the other.

jrn573de - sports literature: week ten lecture

Education

sports literature week

sports stories

sports literature rich

ritual sports hero

modern sports ritual

dangerous game

story of magnum

recreational game