JRN 573DE - Sports Literature: Week Five Lecture

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate Professor

Spring 2015/ Week Five


Week Five - 1

● This week we read Messenger, Part IV: The Modern

Ritual Sports Hero.

● This section is critical to an understanding of how

literature and by extension sportswriting have created

and then dismissed these long-standing

characterizations of sports figures covered to date.


Week Five - 2

● The fourth and final section of Messenger’s work is the

most difficult without direct knowledge of the works of

Hemingway and Faulkner, two writers who are

considered among the finest in U.S. history.

● They were not sportswriters in the modern sense, but

Hemingway’s influence is still with us in part.


Week Five - 3

● Nevertheless, their work as summarized by Messenger

is essential for understanding the depth of sports

heroes in the modern age and all that it demands.

● What does the modern age demand? It wants its heroes

to do the impossible but according to external terms set

by commercial demands and fans.


Week Five - 4

● The modern age demands that heroes perform for the

enjoyment of the spectator while showing themselves to

be accessible people who share the same values as the

fans.


Week Five - 5

● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero, however, rejects that

assumption by the spectator, as the works of

Hemingway and Faulkner suggest in the context of the

characters who populate their work (who are not typical

athletes according to the present experience of

spectators who think primarily of what they see on

television.)


Week Five - 6

● The following slides show the distinction between the

Modern Ritual Sports Hero and the other two figures

studied to date in class.


Week Five - 7

● Popular Sports Hero: Performed for the spectator and

delivered whatever the spectator sought from the

experience.

● School Sports Hero: A greatly diminished type by now,

this figure sought to replicate the brain/brawn/valorous

virtues of a military figure, humble but confident.


Week Five - 8

● The Popular Sports Hero and the School Sports Hero

are direct reflections of the industrialization of the

United States in the 19th century were constructed by

newspaper, book and magazine writers and late in film.


Week Five - 9

● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero stood as a throwback to

a pre-industrial heroic ideal.

● Both Hemingway and Faulkner belittled popular and

school sports hero but held the ritual sports hero in

reverence.


Week Five - 10

● And it’s here where sports become something more real

and hence more sacred, according to Messenger’s

reading of the novels by Hemingway and Faulkner.


Week Five - 11

● Hemingway is more closely tied to Cooper and Thoreau

in his portrayal of personal experience through play and

games.

● Faulkner, on the hand, falls more in line with

Hawthorne’s view of play as a necessary and important

ritual.


Week Five - 12

● Messenger wrote that because of this leap back in time,

Hemingway and Faulkner cut against the grain of sports

during the 20th century.

● The characters in their stories are “adept and self-

sufficient in all the tasks associated with their rites.”

(233)


Week Five - 13

● What Hemingway and Faulkner sought was authenticity

at a time (first half of the 20th century) when authenticity

was in retreat under an onslaught of modernity.

● They found authenticity in the solitary sports figure,

whether it is a bullfighter (Hemingway) or hunter

(Faulkner).


Week Five - 14

● That’s not to say they offered nostalgic portrayals of

characters. Hemingway’s bullfight in The Sun Also

Rises participates in a highly organized spectacle not

unlike that of American football.

● But Hemingway and Faulkner present their strongest

characters as solitary forces.


Week Five - 15

● Hemingway disliked team sports, particularly football,

which he criticized because of the volume of rules

controlling the action of the players. (238)

● He created admirable characters (to him) who were

“physically exposed to the natural world or to danger in

the enclosed arena.” (239).


Week Five - 16

● In short, Hemingway liked outdoorsmen and bullfighters

and boxers.

● Interestingly, Hemingway places the action outside the

United States for the most, because he saw sport as a

universal metaphor for life, not something specific to the

American experience.


Week Five - 17

● The Modern Ritual Sports Hero was one whose

“elemental experience is lost in only simulated conflict

and danger.” (239)

● That is a critical distinction, one that expands our

definition of what sport means to people who observe

and write about it.


Week Five - 18

● Hemingway “infused the idea of competition with a

lasting sense of the individual’s struggle as a Ritual

Sports Hero.” (240).

● This clarity of vision made Hemingway into one of the

finest writers of sports literature, one whose work all

sportswriters need to read.


Week Five - 19

● Faulkner’s approach is more difficult to locate in his

dense prose but the Modern Ritual Sports Hero

emerges time and time again.

● In short, Faulkner wrote about sport and ritual as

necessary components of individual life but with goals

that could never be fully attained.


Week Five - 20

● Ultimately, an analysis of the works of Hemingway and

Faulkner generates a conclusion that both writers say

the Modern Ritual Sports Hero as who craved freedom

of action and freedom of consequence more than

material rewards.

● The actions of their characters suggest powerful forces.


Week Five - 21

● The most powerful force is compressed in a single term:

“agon.”

● Agon is a word from classical Greek that essentially

means total commitment to the struggle that can be

framed in sacred terms.


Week Five - 22

● That leads to the question of whether it is possible in an

age where “sports is always with us” to observe an

athlete who is practicing total commitment in real terms

to something sacred.

● Is the Modern Ritual Sports Hero as Hemingway and

Faulkner defined it around today? That’s hard to say.


Week Five - 23

● Interestingly, Derek Jeter’s post-baseball career is

focused on publishing the innermost thoughts of

athletes through a site called The Players Tribune.

● To date, it is clear that the athletes whose

autobiographical pieces are posted on that site see

themselves as Modern Ritual Sports Heroes.


Week Five - 24

● But the public generally does not see athletes as

Modern Ritual Sports Heroes.

● The media also tend to see athletes as people who are

not engaged in a sacred calling.


Week Five - 25

● It’s fair to state that the total commercialization of high-

level collegiate sports has ushered away the traditional

School Sports Hero.

● And it seems the same can be said of the Modern Ritual

Sports Hero based on mainstream coverage, where

individualistic athletes are marginalized.


Week Five - 26

● That would apparently leave us only with the Popular

Sports Hero among the trio of figures created by

American literature.

● Yet writers who practice outside of sports are still

finding examples of the other two sports figures, as we

will learn as we dive into the anthology in two weeks.


Week Five - 27

● And as noted earlier, the athletes self-define as Modern

Ritual Sports Heroes than as Popular Sports Heroes.

● It is now up to sportswriters to determine how to

generate that characterization, and it helps to know that

what appears to be obvious may not be based on our

readings to date.

Education

JRN 573DE - Sports Literature: Week Five Lecture