Continuing last week's
topic on sports in literature, we were
looking briefly at sports in the work of
Hemingway. Hemingway wrote mainly about man
against beast sports, chiefly, hunting and
bullfighting. He tended to romanticize these
sports: No matter how actually brutal the
sports he discussed were, the "Hemingway
Hero" was always a character to be
admired.
In the forward of the book The Sporting
Spirit: Athletes in Literature and Life ,
Heywood Hale Brown said of Hemingway,
"the most powerful passages in Hemingway
are concerned with blood sports." As I
mentioned last week, Hemingway's description
of the bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises
is one of his most romantic.
By the early 20th century, it seems
apparent that many of our writers grew up
with sports, and played and watched sports as
children. Also, while they reflect on sports
with childish glee, they often have a
cynicism about sports that comes with
intellectual enlightenment. For example,
William Carlos Williams in his poem "At
the Ball Game:"
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformally
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them
Here it appears Williams shows a cynical
side as an onlooker from the outside. A man
like Williams, who was a physician in an era
of diseases such as polio and the Spanish flu
as well as poet, seems to realize the
silliness of our passion for sports. However,
Williams gets caught up in pageantry quite
quickly.
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius
If you isolate the word "escape"
from this passage, you get an idea of just
exactly why sports are so popular, not only
in our culture but all over the world. They
are an escape from reality, not a substitute
for reality.
Baseball has been a sport of much more
romantic poetry than other sports. We've been
graced with such gems as "Casey at the
Bat," Fitzgerlad's "Cobb Would Have
Caught It," Robert Wallace's "The
Double Play," and even John Updike's
"Tao in Yankee Stadium:"
The old men who saw Hans Wagner
scoop them up in lobster hands,
the opposing pitcher's pertinent hesitations
the sky . . . Mantles thick baked neck
(12-18)
If baseball tends to be a more Romantic
sport, football is just the opposite. From
much of my research, football tends to be
rooted more in realism. Check out this
description of the game by Jack Kerouac from
Vanity of Duluoz.
"As we binged and banged in dusty
bloody fields, we didnt even dream we'd all
end up in World War II, some of us killed,
some of us wounded, the rest of us
eviscerated of 1930's innocent
ambition."
As the Henry B. Chapin editor of
"Sports in Literature" says,"
The image of the dumb jock especially haunts
the game of football." James Thurber's
story "The Dumb Football Player"
portrays this image almost perfectly:
"He was a tackle on the football
team, named Bolenciecwcz. . . In order to be
eligible to play it was necessary for him to
keep up in his studies, a very difficult
matter, for while he was not dumber than an
ox he was not any smarter."
It may be precisely the realism involved
in football why so many sports fans I know
don't care for football at all. It is much
more violent and appears to involve fewer
intellectual skills than other sports.
This by no means concludes this discussion
on sports and literature. I hope to discuss
the topic further in future editions of The
Chalk Lines.
Next article > "Games Without Frontiers"
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