Four Great Sports Books That Go Way Beyond the Game

What are sports about? For those who take the matter all too seriously, the answer divides roughly between two camps, Moneyballers and Metaphorists. The first, made up of gamblers, stats freaks and those annoyed by the application of romantic gloss to any human endeavor, cares about the action itself, codified by hard numbers and the final score. Its patron saint is Bill James and its bible is Michael Lewis’s 2004, Moneyball, the ongoing impact of which resembles something like Martin Luther’s 95 theses. That analogy—pretentious, obscure, extraneous—is one that Moneyballers would have no use for. For them sports is about sport. The game is the thing.

Metaphorists, on the other hand, don’t care about the score. Their patron saint is long-dead essayist Jacques Barzun, whose 1954 declaration, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules, and reality of the game,” is deployed anytime there’s a call to trumpet baseball’s cultural heft. Barzun made the world safe for Susan Sarandon’s rambling discourses in Bull Durham, book titles like Field of Dreams and Why Time Begins on Opening Day, and, well, me. All my books are something of a con.

They center around sports, but they’re “about” something bigger, be it life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, the ripple effects of sudden death, or the emblematic endurance of an iconic American steel town. When I began researching my new book about lacrosse, The American Game, I didn’t realize I would be essentially engaging in an argument with Barzun until I heard Hampton University head coach Chazz Woodson say, “Lacrosse is America….Lacrosse really exemplifies all that America is.”

Of course, the divide isn’t absolute. The best writers, like the Washington Post’s semi-retired Thomas Boswell, toggle seamlessly between both camps. But there’s a reason sports has long been the space where issues of race, sex, drugs, money, patriotism, civic pride and planning, child rearing, crime, international relations and, now, gender, regularly play out. We love it so much, too much probably, that we can’t help but pour all that we are into it.

Herewith, one Metaphorist’s delight, a list of sports books that aren’t really about sports.

A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

Diner may be my favorite film, not least because the sports-centric screenplay—Barry Levinson originally had it culminating at the 1959 NFL championship with its Baltimore Colts-obsessed protagonists hanging victoriously from the goal posts—got completely hijacked by the subtext of desperate male friendship. Exley’s 1968 novel was one of the first to blow up the sports book, make the faceless mass in the stands the story; his main character’s stalking of his own white whale, Giants running back Frank Gifford, is actually a picaresque and merciless meditation on ambition, booze, fading youth, male ego, and the gut-dropping moment when fandom becomes fate. It’s painful how beautiful it is, and vice-versa. (See also: Among the Thugs by Bill Buford and Jimmy Connors Saved My Life by Joel Drucker)

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

This gorgeously disciplined gem—as much an heir to, yes, The Great Gatsby as it is to Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al—is the easiest play here; one of the great novels about an athlete dying young is obviously not just a sports book. But even the straightforward telling of backup catcher Bruce Pearson’s heartbreaking demise is oddly secondary to the sketching of death’s effect on every life it brushes, the wry coding of male banter, and the hilariously meta commentary on the writing of this particular story by its fictional pitcher, Henry “Author” Wiggin. As one wise head, demanding that Wiggin stick to the gloomy point, warns: “Even the people that read it will think it is about baseball or some such stupidity as that, for baseball is stupid, Author, and I hope you put it in your book, a game rigged by rich idiots to keep poor idiots from wising up to how poor they are.”

To which Wiggin replies: “I would never put any such a thing as that in my book.”

(See also: A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean—featuring BTDS’s lone rival for a sport’s books greatest final line)

The Mosquito Bowl by Buzz Bissinger

Perhaps the biggest bait-and-switch in sports book history. Consider: This is the author of Friday Night Lights, the movie and TV series-spawning best-seller about Texas high school football. Title and cover copy says that it’s about a “bruising and bloody” football game on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve, 1944, between two Marine regiments composed of 56 former college players, including three All-Americans and 22 starters from powers like Notre Dame and Purdue. Yet, Bissinger knows that focusing on a glorified pick-up game in such a context is absurd; months later, more than a dozen of the 65 men who played were killed on Okinawa. So, whether by choice or the fact that no broadcast or play-by-play on the game, exists, this is a “sports” book with almost no sport in it. The Mosquito Bowl itself, which ended with the score 0-0, takes up one paragraph in 337 pages.

Instead, Bissinger produced an impeccably researched and agonizingly compassionate record of the heroes’ lives and deaths, a relentless litany of the Pacific War’s gore, death and body-ravaging horrors, as well as an aging son’s tribute to his forever war-numbed father. In the end, it’s a reversal of a sports book, a story about being uprooted from whatever we believe is “civilized,” taken away from games and all they evoke of health, peace, youth and home, and forced to wield that wondrous athletic skill in a landscape resembling hell. (See also: The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski, and The Real All-Americans by Sally Jenkins)

The City Game by Pete Axthelm

Ostensibly an exploration of New York’s basketball scene in the 1970s, from playground ball to the NBA champion Knicks, it’s actually a subtle portrait of urban decline and the growing gap between haves and have-nots; read it in concert with Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, maybe with some Velvet Underground playing in the background, and you’ve got the era nailed.

Here’s Axthelm describing the 1964 public high school championship game between Boys High of Brooklyn and Benjamin Franklin High of Harlem at the old Madison Square Garden:

“Boys won the title; but the result was quickly overshadowed by a seat-slashing, bottle-throwing melee that resulted in the end of high school ball in the Garden and established a negative landmark in city basketball. The riot occurred against the tense backdrop of the city’s first black school boyott; and it happened on St. Patrick’s Day, when many patrolmen who might have handled the crowd were out parading. But administrators were not much interested in the details or causes of the disturbance….”

(See also: Levels of the Game by John McPhee; Raging Bull by Jake LaMotta)

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