JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Thirteen

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Thirteen


Week Thirteen - 1

● This week, we explore North Dallas Forty (1979), a film based on the novel by Pete Gent, a former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys.

● The final response paper of the semester is due at the end of this week. Respond to the film as you would any of the articles or book chapters we have.


Week Thirteen - 2

Pete Gent


Week Thirteen - 3

● The film is based on Gent’s 1973 novel, a fictionalized reflection of his NFL career as a wide receiver with the Dallas Cowboys from 1964 to 1968. He finished his career with the New York Giants.

● Gent did not play college football at Michigan State, but the Cowboys signed him anyway.


Week Thirteen - 4

● Gent’s best season occurred in 1966 when he caught 27 passes for 474 yards.

● Gent, who died in 2011, is best known for his novel that emerged at a time when sports literature was dramatically changing toward a more realistic portrayal of athletes.


Week Thirteen - 5

● "It was a mordant black comedy at a time when mordant black comedy could actually sell sports books, and when a kind of coruscating and deeply adult honesty was briefly in vogue,” wrote Jeff MacGregor in an appreciation of Gent in 2011 as part of a longer ESPN.com piece on sports literature.

● http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/macgregor-111003/football-mythology-wake-peter-gent-death-new-walter-payton-book


Week Thirteen - 6

● "Like Dan Jenkins' 1972 novel "Semi-Tough," it presented drugs and sex and racism and moral absurdity and every variation of ethical and practical corruption as being foundational to the game of football. These books were very much in the mode of other books in that long gone, bad haircut, counterculture time,” wrote MacGregor.


Week Thirteen - 7

● From 1970 to 1974, a number of factual and fictional books by former athletes revealed the true nature of professional and college sports, changing sports lit.

● The trend started years earlier, in 1960, with pitcher Jim Brosnan’s The Long Season.


Week Thirteen - 8

● The book “ … was a new kind of sportswriting — candid, shrewd and highly literate, more interested in presenting the day-to-day lives and the actual personalities of the men who played the game than in maintaining the fiction of ballplayers as all-American heroes and role models,” the New York Times stated.

● http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/sports/baseball/jim-brosnan-a-pitcher-with-the-cardinals-and-reds-brought-new-perspective-to-baseball-writing-dies-at-84.html


Week Thirteen - 9

● In 1970, Dave Meggyesy documented abuse in the NFL his factual Out of Their League, a factual work about his time as a pro.

● Jim Bouton’s factual Ball Four, also released in 1970, likewise showed Major League Baseball to be brimming with pathologies of all kinds.


Week Thirteen - 10

● Yet it was Gent’s book more than others that seemed to infiltrate American culture outside of the general sports fans, and the movie version had much to do with that when released in 1979.

● That’s when pro football fully emerged in full as America’s sport with enormous television ratings underscoring its popularity as spectacle.


Week Thirteen - 11

• The book told the story of the North Dallas Bulls, a fictionalized version of the Dallas Cowboys.

• The work featured characters who resembled players such as quarterback Don Meredith and coaches such as Dallas head coach Tom Landry.


Week Thirteen - 12

• “’North Dallas Forty’ was among the early books providing unsettling views of pro sports that went beyond the game details on the sports pages,” the New York Times wrote in Gent’s obituary in 2011.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/sports/football/peter-gent-69-ex-player-who-wrote-north-dallas-forty-dies.html


Week Thirteen - 13

● The book effectively served as an indictment of the NFL and its managerial elite, described through its characters as mean-spirited and ruthless.

● The characters themselves can be interpreted as reflecting the internal tension each displays between the ritual sports hero and the popular sports hero.


Week Thirteen - 14

● The movie revealed these excesses and tensions in cinematic fashion, featuring what former NFL player and current football scholar Michael Oriard described as a hyper realistic depiction of a tackle in a piece posted on Deadspin after Gent died:


Week Thirteen - 15

● The tackle is “absolutely stunning, the most violent tackle ever shown in a football film, and it has not been surpassed. Fans at the time had never seen the violence of football up so close. I played professional football, but I was stunned by the violence of the collision. It did not seem fake. It felt more real than the reality I knew,” wrote Oriard.

• http://deadspin.com/5847792/the-impact-and-the-darkness-the-lasting-effect-of-peter-gents-north-dallas-forty


Week Thirteen - 16


Week Thirteen - 17

● Oriard did not think the movie was a classic, and he did not applaud the somewhat contrived Hollywood-type ending that seemed to undermine the rest of the movie.

● Yet it stands as something more than piece that only reflects its historical period of the 1970s, Oriard concludes:


Week Thirteen - 18

● "But the experience of playing professional football—the pain and fear, but also the exhilaration-that is at the heart of North Dallas Forty rings as true today, for all the story's excesses, as it did in the 1970s. Peter Gent knew them firsthand and translated them into enduring art,” he wrote.


Week Thirteen - 19

● And that is the highest praise a writer can received for any work: “enduring art.”


Week Thirteen - 20

● When we examine the scope of The New Yorker articles and the film, we see clearly that sports writing can be – indeed, must be – rooted in the wider meaning of sport as a reflection of culture.

● Sport endures beyond statistics, which are abstractions of performance. Literature reflects humanity.


Week Thirteen - 21

● Literary accounts whether factual or fictional accounts transform the games and the players into works of art when the truth is the object

● Gent knew that in his novel, and the film reflects that internal sensibility from one who experienced it, as Oriard points out.

Education

JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Thirteen