The Literature of Sport

The mascot was a horse - hence my affection!

I am a miserably un-athletic person. It isn’t (just) clumsiness. I’m an adult toe-walker. In children, toe-walking and odd gaits can signal neurological issues and my parents paid for a battery of tests and procedures that would place my feet flat against the floor. My favorite was probably the summer both of my legs were put in casts. True child of the 80s, I insisted on neon yellow and neon pink (one on each leg). My dad was horrified - and the procedure didn’t work. Today, I wish it had. I have a lot of knee pain now and my tendons stretch by day and contract by night, hobbling me by morning. On top of this, I’ve absorbed a lifetime of gym teachers, friends, and family members telling me how physically inept I am. My deficiencies kept me firmly on the sidelines when it came to playing sports, but I was an annual spectator for awhile.

When I was a young girl (say six) the bank my dad worked for became a sponsor for the East Coast Hockey League team The Wheeling Thunderbirds. My dad became a season ticket holder and I became a fan of the chicken sandwiches the club dining room made and of the freedom I was given between periods to roam around and buy pizza or ice cream. Once, I even got to meet most of the team. I humiliated my dad by saying that I didn’t like sports and by hiding in the corner (I was six, again) but those hulking players lifted up my chair and brought me out of hiding and I developed a child crush on John Blessman. Apparently I was into facial hair then?

My dad passed away when I was eighteen and I haven’t been back in a hockey arena since. I picked up The Game because I wanted to read outside of my comfort zone (this was the same summer that I stumbled into Friday Night Lights). Part of me envies the type of person who can get into sports, who can cheer on their team, who can learn the vocabulary. Sports are still mysterious to me; I can’t perform the motions and I often can’t concentrate on the spectacle. Hockey nights with dad did give me a rudimentary understanding of hockey; I used to focus on the puck with a strange sort of intensity, trying to guess where it would end up. 

Dryden’s book is certainly for hockey people - for the people who love the game, who remember victories, who mourn defeats. But because it is so well-written by someone who loves words and enjoys observing and often feels outside looking in, it was for me, too. Most of all, I valued his observations about:

- the codifying of free time so that even though kids might play hockey younger, they play less than they might outside of the structure of official games. This made me think of the difference between my own unofficial writing and the very regimented writing of some of my fellows. Maybe I am accomplishing less - but I feel that my independent scribblings teach me a great deal!

- The way that celebrity is cultivated. If you are a celebrity, he writes, you can do something once and be known for it. This brought to mind Geddy’s recent photography of penguins. As a fan, I would take that one instance as proof that he is a birdwatcher (he probably is) but I can see how a famous person could cultivate an image based on quite shallow evidence. 

- the fact that you might be wonderful at something - that you might make a life of it - but that you could go forward from there and have another life. What a brave idea! 

I re-read Friday Night Lights in order to create the lectures that would help my students. When I’m reading for my students, it’s a far different experience than when I read for myself. This time around, I focused on issues of race (mostly negative), gender, education, class, and community. The last category is a sort of double-edged sword; it encompasses the most negative aspects of the town and its game and the most positive. Ultimately, the book is a bittersweet one...

In these girls shows how positively sports can impact a community – especially one that gets closed off by winter snows! It has been my favorite of these sports reads so far for the beauty of its phrasing, the way it introduced the girls and their hopes (everything is possible at eighteen!), and its insights into gender and athletics.

Last Shot has been the most painful read in this category. It amazes me that there are communities in my country where the everyday experience is so foreign to mine– and that they exist a mere 400 miles away. It reminded me of the things I mostly take for granted (safety, shelter, education) and made me want to change things for the young men and women who live in places like the Coney Island projects – besieged by poverty, drugs, and gangs. The author does a wonderful job of charting his own transformation; his feelings change as he spends time with the young men of Lincoln High, their coaches, and their families. The most heartbreaking pages come at the end of the book, when the reader is forced to confront the fact that for every Stephon Marbury there are a host of other young men who will not escape from poverty. I especially mourned Russell; having gotten to know him through this book, I wanted something good for him.  

So I go forward from here, grateful to have spent some time in the world of sports writing and missing those nights when “Sirius” played and those well-padded skaters came bursting onto the ice. One of the best parts of teaching is everything I learn along the way, and these works have certainly changed my understanding of my student-athletes!