1. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (1986)
Ford’s sequel — Independence Day — won the Pulitzer, but this is the one that did it for me. Ford’s main character (I don’t think you can really call him a protagonist or an antagonist) is Frank Bascombe, a man devastated by the death of his son and the subsequent loss of his family due to his detachment from what remained. Writing for a thinly veiled Sports Illustrated-like magazine (Ford wrote for SI in real life), Frank’s struggle to live with his own poor decisions and the growing dark cloud looming over everything he does pushes him toward his ultimate fate. Is it The Great American Novel? One of them, at least.
“…if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined. I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin. And I am still here to tell about it.” (p. 4)
2. Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A Dream by H.G. ” Buzz” Bissinger(1990)
Football as religion. If Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is the greatest American non-fiction novel ever, this is No. 2. No matter what you think you’re about to read going in, Bissinger flips your preconceived notions on their head and delivers a two-fisted assault on the senses. You are in Odessa. You feel the pressure that comes with each game. You learn the history of the people you come to care about so deeply. Finishing it the first time I felt a sense of loss because I knew that was an experience I’d never get to live through again. But wait! They made a movie! And a TV show! And neither sucked! Good looking out.
“When Boobie Miles returned to the football field, no one called out his name with those bellowing chants that had rocked the Watermelon Feed in a moment that seemed like a millennium before. There were no bursts of applause, no coach’s speech comparing him to the great Permian runners of the past, no take-your-sweet-time walk down the aisle of the
crowded high school cafeteria. In the space of five weeks he had become an afterthought whose past performance earned no special privilege and seemed largely forgotten.” (p. 194)
3. Underworld by Don Delillo (1997)
Is this Delillo’s Magnum Opus? I like to think it is. Beginning on October 3, 1951, this book shoots out of the gate by taking the reader inside Polo Grounds as Robby Thomson’s home run off Ralph Branca sails out of the park to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers 5-4 — “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World” — and the fate of the home run ball snakes its way through this labyrinthine story, the pursuit of which hovers over the lives of several of the key characters. Criticized for being overly-long, I wonder if those who said that had ever read Delillo before? Was he not building up to something like this over the course of almost 30 years? Interestingly enough, Delillo wrote another book about sports — End Zone (1972) — about a college football team in Texas that is on a lot of lists like the one you’re reading. Not that that’s a bad book, but I wouldn’t even put it in DD’s top 5.
“The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays a hurdy-gurdy….Thomson is out in center field now dodging fans who come in rushes and jumps. They jump against his body, they want to take him to the ground, show him snapshots of their families.” (p. 49)
4. The Fight by Norman Mailer (1975)
Stephen King’s my favorite writer, ever. Nobody tells a story like him. But Mailer’s in my top 5. Gary Karr, who has worked on the sports desk since 1892, likes to tell a story about the night of this fight, when the phones at The Eagle rang so many times trying to find out the winner that at one point they were just picking up the phone, saying “Ali”, then hanging up. In the time the book was written, Ali and Foreman were looked at as almost modern-day superheroes, but Mailer strips that away and looks at their insecurities and fears. But Mailer’s the star here, even as he writes about two of the greatest fighters of all time. What was Mailer’s obsession with boxing? I can only think it had to do with his own confrontational, violent nature, the appeal of the sport, to him, was just too strong to deny. But the truth of why that attraction was so intense was also probably too much for even him to swallow. So he wrote about it. Better than paying a therapist, I suppose.
“Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane, and in this doubled-over position he tried to wander out to the center of the ring. All the while his eyes were on Ali and he looked up with no anger as if Ali, indeed, was the man he knew best in the world and would see him on his dying day. Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. . .”
5. Surprise! By You, The Reader (2010)
I really like doing these lists, but not as much as I like hearing from you after you read them. So pick this spot for me — I had five different books here at different times and couldn’t decide on one, so you tell me. If I haven’t read it, I will. Give it a week or so and I’ll pick one and put it here. If it’s your suggestion that goes up, I’ll give you plenty of props right here on this very blog. (AND HERE YOU GO, VIA TRENT IN MCPHERSON)
I’m out. TA.
