Sports literature is becoming very serious business. It is now a genre in itself that embraces non-fiction, the history of costume, memoirs and fictional fiction. It is a phenomenon that has certainly not escaped one of the most intelligent and vigilant observers of the evolution of our customs and our mentality, Simon Kuper who writes a regular column in the "Financial Times". We publish below one of his articles "How books about sport got serious" published in the weekend supplement "life & arts" of the London business newspaper. The Italian translation and adaptation are by Giuseppe di Pirro. A very interesting article for which it is worth spending 10 minutes of our time.
Financial Times sports columnist Simon Kuper joined the London business masthead in 1994. He writes about sports and also about books. He was born in Uganda but raised in the Netherlands, Sweden, Jamaica and the United States. He studied at Oxford and Harvard and at the Berlin Polytechnic. His column in the Financial Times seeks to frame sport and athletes within their country, time and society as well as, of course, the sport itself
The flowering of sports literature in Europe
When I was 10, my family moved to California for a year, and I discovered baseball. My father bought me two anthologies of baseball articles, which I read in pieces. I still have the books, the pages dirty with food crumbs from the early 80s. In one was a profile of Ted Williams, the famous Boston Red Sox player, written by one John Updike. I had never heard of Updike, but the article stayed with me. It was better than any sports text I ever came across growing up in Europe. Good European writers then rarely took an interest in sports.
All of that has changed. For 25 years there has been an award, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, for sports book of the year. In 2015 it was won by David Goldblatt for his book on football in the British Isles. Indeed since rowing coach Dan Topolski won his first accolade in 1989 for True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny, sports literature has flourished in Britain and, subsequently, throughout Europe.
A look across the ocean
American writers have always taken sports seriously. Ernest Hemingway, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac have all worked as sportswriters. Hemingway once received $30.000 from Sports Illustrated for a 2000-word piece on bullfighting. Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo have set novels in sports. Richard Ford even wrote a novel called The Sportswriter.
Often in American literature, the athlete has embodied the "American dream". He was the boy who came from nowhere to great fame, but who was always in danger of downsizing and returning to nowhere. That's why, as the American Dream faded after World War II, American literature became populated by downsized athletes and former high school stars: Tennessee's Brick Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Williams, John Updike's Angstrom Rabbit, Arthur Miller's Biff Loman and, much later, the "Swede" Levov in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. The former boxers played by Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront are of the same type. Once all-American heroes, they represent broken American dreams.
Sports literature in the old continent: Great Britain
However, in Europe a rigid division had for a long time separated the "high" from the "low" culture. Opera represented high culture and sport low – and therefore was not deemed worthy of serious consideration by the writers. The British wrote books about sports. In my small office in Paris, I have a sports library which is certainly one of the best in Europe. It is crammed with hundreds of books collected since the 30s by my grandfather, father and me.
Until the 90s, though, few of these books had big ambitions. Most were mere autobiographies of sportsmen, or breathless accounts of long-dead sports, or pleasant light prose (usually about cricket) like that of AG Macdonell. Only a handful of writers have produced “proletarian literature” set in sport – notably Alan Sillitoe's short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) and David Storey's novel This Sporting Life. ] (1960), set in a rugby league.
Historically, cricket was the game that English writers learned in public school. On a summer Saturday in London circa 1900, one might have found oneself pitchside watching Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes), AA Milne (of Winnie the Pooh), PG Wodehouse (of Jeeves), EW Hornung (of Raffles) and JM Barrie (of Peter Pan as well as Allahakbarries cricket club) play in the alternating teams. The teatime conversation beyond the cucumber sandwiches must have been passable. Decades later, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard were playing together on those same London courts.
Yet none of them wrote seriously about cricket. Nor did Samuel Beckett, a lifelong cricket enthusiast who played two first-class matches for Dublin University. Philosopher AJ Ayer wrote accounts of football matches for The Observer in the 50s, but he seems to have taken this as a diversion from philosophical reflection. His favorite opening line: "The match started at exactly 3:00pm."
Most of the best books relating to British sport before the 90s were by foreign authors. Trinidadian native CLR James showed in Beyond a Boundary (1963) that cricket could shed light on race and empire. Only A Game? (1976) by Irish footballer Eamon Dunphy remains arguably the best player's account of English football. A Handful of Summers (1978), by South African tennis player Gordon Forbes, is an imperishable reminder of youth. (sports literature is, predominantly, a male genre).
Football fever among readers
It took a New Zealander to bring British sports literature to maturity. In 1985 John Gaustad foolishly opened a sports bookshop on Caxton Walk, quite a distance from London's Charing Cross Road (the street of the bookshops). “I started with a single employee,” he once told me, “a man with a dream.” Oddly enough, Sportspages worked. Gaustad soon teamed up with the William Hill horse agency company to create the literary prize, which for years was staged in his small, now closed shop. The literature on soccer, Britain's favorite sport, took off.
Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, the 90 William Hill Award-winning memoir of a football fan, is usually thought to be a pioneering work of the genre.
However, Gaustad counts on Pete Davies' All Played Out (1990), which chronicles England's journey to that year's World Cup. “Davies was a sort of John the Baptist to Hornby,” Gaustad said. “His book helped define what Sportspages was: enthusiasts engaged in boisterous and interesting discussions about the game they loved. It was like a voice that no one had ever heard."
In 1991, when I went round publishers in London to publicize my first book, which was about the meaning of football around the world, it was only thanks to Davies that the phrase 'football book' was no longer considered an oxymoron . The copy of All Played Out in my library today is the one a publisher gave me back then, trying to explain what he hoped I would do. Another brave publisher gave me a contract. In 1992 I took a train to connect with the boat to the continent with a typewriter in my backpack.
The explosion of sports literature
Just then, Fever Pitch made its appearance. A thoroughly original book, it examines the seemingly insignificant experience of being a football fan. It uses football to shed light on one man's life, and is also an exhilarating social history of Britain from the 60s to 90s. At least in part, the book was inspired by hours of reading Sportspages fanzines. "The publishers may have refused to accept that there was such a beast as the literate football fan," Hornby later wrote, "but there were always hundreds of them in Caxton Walk, so I knew who I was writing for." .
Essential, moreover, that Hornby loved American literature. His first book, published shortly before Fever Pitch, was a collection of essays called Contemporary American Fiction. Hornby knew what good writers could do with sports. In particular, he had read Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, the fictional biography of a drunk in and out of mental hospitals whose life gains meaning from following the New York Giants football team. In sports literature, we owe everything to American cultural imperialism.
Fever Pitch unleashed a flood of British football books – by one estimate, more in the UK than in all other countries combined. Some writers, in Hornby's footsteps, used football to analyze their own lives. Others, like Alex Bellos' Futebol, about Brazil, or David Winner's Brilliant Orange, about Holland, used football to interpret an entire country. Later writers regarded football as a sort of Proustian madeleine to revisit some bygone era, often 70s Britain. (There is a whole subgenre of literature dedicated to Brian Clough, the great manager of Nottingham Forest).
The new football books were met with suspicion. Some critics felt that bombastic “writers” should stay out of what has traditionally been a working-class game. These critics said: “Football is 22 men in shorts running around kicking a piece of plastic. It is not a suitable subject for literature”.
This argument is nonsense. One could equally argue that writing consists only of using pieces of plastic, that playing the piano consists only of striking pieces of ivory, and so on. Anything becomes a suitable subject for literature if it inspires good literature. Football did. Sometimes the books are even better than football deserves.
spread on the continent
Soon the new genus reached continental Europe. In 1994 two Dutchmen who had read Hornby's collection of football writings My Favorite Year started publishing a literary football magazine called 'Hard Gras'. In 1997, in the era of the football literature bubble, when publishers were willing to throw money at any football book as if it were a subprime mortgage, I launched a British knockoff. It failed, however Jonathan Wilson's The Blizzard has since made the idea work in Britain. Other football-related literary magazines thrive elsewhere: Offside in Sweden, Josimar in Norway, Panenka in Spain, Howler in the United States, while Hard Gras has become the best-selling literary magazine in Dutch history. Recently the genre has even reached snooty France. The other day a French writer consulted my library to borrow some books. Now he is in Rio de Janeiro looking for a book on Brazilian football.
This kind of insight into sports writing has become more necessary as day-to-day sports journalism has become more difficult. After the early 90s, when satellite TV channels began broadcasting sports incessantly, newspapers and websites expanded their sports coverage. Many men devour it. To quote Andrew Card, former US President George W. Bush's chief of staff: "He does not dwell on the newspaper, but reads the sports page every day" Noam Chomsky, the famous American political intellectual, maintains that any "wise serious media critic” must look at sports and soap operas: “These are the kinds of things that occupy most of the media – most of it is not packing the latest El Salvador news for the politically savvy, that means diverting ordinary people away from the things that are really important.”
Sports journalism is changing shape
However, as sports clubs have grown rich on new TV revenues, they have become more media savvy. Now they control and restrict sports journalism.
Players are subjected to "media training", press officers censor interviews and sports journalists are locked up in those artificial pseudo-events that are press conferences. In the last great American sports novel, Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, reporters pester Norm Oglesby, the fictitious owner of the Dallas Cowboys football team, about his plans to move the stadium:
Some of the media keep talking about the stadium, but Norm ignores them. Billy begins to grasp the sense of the dynamic taking place, an equation of power such as that of the CEO of a giant company face to face with the urinal disk he studies very closely how this is imbued with his own powerful personal effluvium. Norm's job is to maximize the value of the Cowboys brand, and the media's job is to soak up every drop, every splash, and every spray of PR he sends their way.
And what we do is absorb all of that. At the Euro 2012 football championship, for example, England manager Roy Hodgson and captain Steven Gerrard held a press conference in Donetsk, Ukraine. With the British media industry in crisis, several hundred of us journalists gathered on the fringes of Europe to listen to two men say absolutely nothing for 30 minutes.
The next evening we wrote our match reports. These mattered at a time when fewer fans than ever attended matches. When a prewar radio announcer named Ronald Reagan used to sit in a radio booth in Iowa, pretending he was in Chicago commenting on Cubs baseball games (which he actually covered via telegraph reports), he was the is the only link between the listener and the action.
Deeper and Deeper: Biographies and Autobiographies
However nowadays people can see every game on TV. Match reports aren't much use anymore. More in-depth writing is needed. And now, lastly, we're having it from the athletes. Cricketers – many of whom are upper middle class – have always written good autobiographies. However, footballers from the working class rarely did. Twenty years ago, a publisher told me that he had turned down an autobiography by David Platt, then England captain, because it would only sell 3000 copies and be boring.
All of a sudden, good football autobiographies are mushrooming up. There is an economic explanation. People in football today are rich enough that they no longer need to circulate insubstantial stuff written by others to earn money. They therefore take the trouble to write books only if they have something to say. Sir Alex Ferguson, the recently retired Manchester United manager, who wrote 1999 words in his own handwriting for his first autobiography in 250.000, has just published another.
Dennis Bergkamp has published a kind of biography of an artist, a "non-autobiography" entitled Stillness and Speed. And Zlatan Ibrahimovic's magnificent tale of a Swedish immigrant, which has sold more than a million copies across Europe, and was shortlisted for the William Hill Prize.
Everyone can be wrong
William Hill judges can be wrong. In 2000, Lance Armstrong won with his cycling autobiography It's Not About the Bike. My return to life]. When it later emerged that Armstrong's career was all about doping, he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. However, he has so far retained his William Hill award.
Some other winners haven't quite stood up to Hornby however. However, I am grateful for the errors of the judges. In 1993 my typewriter and I returned to London and a year later my book Football Against the Enemy was nominated for an award. The FT then forced me to take a terrible journalism course in the backwater town of Hastings, with wages of about £150 a week. I begged the teachers for a day off in order to attend the ceremony at Sportspages in London. Though very reluctant, they let me go. As the ceremony began, I said to myself: "You won't win, you won't win." I won. The prize was £3500. And it couldn't have happened to a poorer man. I spent the afternoon in a nearby pub with Hornby and another of my heroes, sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney. Then I took the last train to Hastings, found my mates in the pub, put £40 behind the bar and for the first time in my life bought drinks all night long.
The 2013 winner will receive £25.000. This implies that the sports book genre has increased its status sevenfold in twenty years, which seems fair enough.
