In the early 1900s editor Maxwell Perkins told anyone who would listen that Chicago sports columnist Ring Lardner was the most talented writer he knew – high praise, given that Perkins’s stable included Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Sports writing can reach a very high level indeed.
The Sports Illustrated list of 100 best sports books shows this. In recommending Roger Kahn’s 1971 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer”, the reviewer explains why this book isn’t just about men in funny clothes running around a field:
“A baseball book the same way Moby Dick is a fishing book, this account of the early-’50s Brooklyn Dodgers is, by turns, a novelistic tale of conflict and change, a tribute, a civic history, a piece of nostalgia and, finally, a tragedy, as the franchise’s 1958 move to Los Angeles takes the soul of Brooklyn with it.”
The audiobook version of “The Boys of Summer” is available here at Audiobooks Now – listen for yourself and see why it’s so highly praised!
Likewise, Ken Dryden’s ‘The Game’ isn’t just about ice hockey. It’s “a well-crafted account of his career combined with a meditation on hockey’s special place in Canadian culture.” Anyone who has spent time in Canada knows that hockey isn’t just a sport.
All this week we’ll be looking at sports books – factual and fiction, men and women, those who want to play and those who are happy just to watch.
