Lecture: Week Four

JRN 573 - Sports Literature

Rich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2015/ Week Four


Week Four - 1

● This week we read Messenger, Part III: The School Sports Hero.


Week Four - 2

● A quick on the readings for the week. Messenger includes material on the fictional Merriwell character and on work by F. Scott Fitzgerald. We will compare and contrast the two in Week Six.

● Read the background this week but please note we will return to Merriwell and Fitzgerald in a couple of weeks.


Week Four - 3

● The School Sports Hero represents a figure who played team sports as part of a process of moving to adulthood and becoming a leader in the community.

● The hero represented the idealization of class, education and power, Messenger writes.


Week Four - 4

● In the aftermath of the Civil War, the School Sports Hero emerged both to summon the memory of war dead and to support the notion of competition as extraordinary training for leadership.

● Most importantly, it represented an opportunity for elite citizens to reassert their power.


Week Four - 5

● It is here where the great intersection between sports and American life at the highest levels of power, social class and occupation occurs.


Week Four - 6

● In short, sports provided the platform for the creation and transmission of a cultural identity based on the role hard work and physical courage played in a reward-based society whose ultimate goal was success.


Week Four - 7

● As Messenger points out, the 1890s marked the moment when “sport and society were more closely integrated” than they would be again.

● The School Sports Hero emerges in all kinds of literary works in support of the ethos of hard work.


Week Four - 8

● The outcome of that effort is why collegiate sports remain with us today as a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that has little to do with education.

● In short, college sports became mythologized during the 1890s as “consistent with what was vital and spontaneous in American life … “(140).


Week Four - 9

● At the core of this mythology amplified by sports literature stood team sports.

● Writers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Richard Harding Davis notably used their background in sports for their work.


Week Four - 10

● In his classic The Red Badge of Courage, Crane wrote about the Civil War, which he did not experience.

● But, he late said, he “got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.”


Week Four - 11

● “The climatic battle scenes of The Red Badge of Courage at times resemble descriptions of football action,” Messenger writes (144).

● Football, Messenger writes, served as the “perfect romantic delusion for a youth in the 1890s, and Crane posed his … hero as a representative figure.” (144)


Week Four - 12

● Frank Norris likewise promoted the idea of a school sports hero in a story titled “Travis Hallet’s Halfback.”

● Travis Hallet was published in 1894. The hero is among the first we can identify as a modern college football hero, a player comfortable with the easy life of privilege who turns into a “beast” on the field. (148)


Week Four - 13

● Davis, meanwhile, deepened the School Sports Hero by writing stories about the college gentleman, a man who is skilled in the social graces of the wealthy elite but who can play sports with a certain primitive intensity.


Week Four - 14

● Gilbert Patton built on these figures with a character named Frank Merriwell.

● The character of Merriwell became “synonymous with last-second heroics” and that figure persists today with players such as Tom Brady.


Week Four - 15

● Merriwell operated in an environment of fair play and teamwork.

● He also served as a role model. He did not swear, smoke or drink, although he did gamble.

● Merriwell’s greatest strength was self-discipline.


Week Four - 16

● We will read a Merriwell story in two weeks but the Learning Module for the week includes a radio version of a Merriwell story to present a sense of the narrative voice as part of a classic “for the good of the team” story.

● Think of Merriwell as the School Sports Hero whose template is followed by writers today.

●


Week Four - 17

● A Messenger writes, Fitzgerald presented the capacity to see psychological shading in the School Sports Hero.

● In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald re-creates the classic School Sports Hero (in the character Allenby) but in The Great Gatsby, he shows the School Sports Hero (in Tom Buchanan) as someone less than heroic.


Week Four - 18

● The importance of the material in this segment of Messenger is to show how the School Sports Hero figure began and has persisted over more than a century of sportswriting and sports literature.

● Some of the best writers in American literature (i.e., Fitzgerald) used sport as a key element in their work.


Week Four - 19

● That showed how the importance of sport to American culture deepened in the 20th century.

● It also shows how sportswriting in the 21st century remains dependent on figures created first from the need to create an idealized hero and then to reflect the true nature of the athletic experience.


Week Four - 20

● Students interested in pursuing sportswriting or sports broadcasting as a career need to understand the antecedents to the figures they cover and that they are simply reflecting developments that emerged over a 100 years ago.


Week Four - 21

● The School Sports Hero figure is of critical importance because its idealized version drives much of the coverage of personalities today and is defined by coaches and college administrators in much the same vocabulary as first used in the 1890s.

Education

Lecture: Week Four