[ARETE] sports flash fiction?

Tue Jan 7 16:43:15 CST 2020

By the way, here's a piece of journalism (by Norman Mailer) that can function (more or less) as flash fiction:
            Paret was aCuban, a proud club fighter who had become welterweight champion because of hisunusual ability to take a punch.  Hisstyle of fighting was to take three punches to the head in order to give backtwo.  At the end of ten rounds, he wouldstill be bouncing, his opponent would have a headache.  But in the last two years, over fifteen-roundfights, he had started to take some bad maulings.

            This fighthad its turns.  Griffith won most of theearly rounds, but Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth.  Griffith had trouble getting up, but made it,came alive and was dominating Paret again before the round was over.  Then Paret began to wilt.  In the middle of the eighth round, after aclubbing punch had turned his back to Griffith, Paret walked three disgustedsteps away, showing his hindquarters. For a champion, he took much too long to turn back around.  It was the first hint of weakness Paret hadever shown, and it must have inspired a particular shame, because he fought therest of the fight as if he were seeking to demonstrate that he could take morepunishment than any man alive.  In thetwelfth, Griffith caught him.  Paret gottrapped in a corner.  Trying to duckaway, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the toprope.  Griffith was in like a cat readyto rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhapsthree or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the whilehe attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken throughthe crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.  I was sitting in the second row of thatcorner—they were not ten feet away from me, and like everybody else, I washypnotized.  I had never seen one man hitanother so hard and so many times.  Overthe referee's face came a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its waythrough him, then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away.  It was the act of a brave man.  Griffith was uncontrollable.  His trainer leaped into the ring, hismanager, his cut man, there were four people holding Griffith, but he was offon an orgy, he had left the Garden, he was back on a hoodlum's street.  If he had been able to break loose from hishandlers and the referee, he would have jumped Paret to the floor and whaled onhim then and there.

            AndParet?  Paret died on his feet.  As he took those eighteen punches somethinghappened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event.  Some part of his death reached out tous.  One felt it hover in the air.  He was still standing in the ropes, trappedas he had been before.  He gave somelittle half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, "I didn't know I wasgoing to die just yet," and then, his head leaning back but still erect, hisdeath came to breathe about him.  Hebegan to pass away.  As he passed, so hislimbs descended beneath him, and he sank slowly to the floor.  He went down more slowly than any fighter hadever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slidessecond by second into its grave.  As hewent down, the sound of Griffith's punches echoed in the mind like a heavy axin the distance chopping into a wet log.

--Ron Smith

-----Original Message-----
From: os2 at cox.net os2--- via Sport_literature_association <sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu>
To: Borushko, Matthew <mborushko at stonehill.edu>; sport_literature_association <sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu>
Sent: Tue, Jan 7, 2020 2:55 pm
Subject: Re: [ARETE] sports flash fiction?

#yiv2869705386 P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;} Matt,

I'm joining the immodest crowd, and especially Ron Smith, who refers to the brevity of some poetry. In the past several years, I have published two collections of poetry. One is a chapbook (Hoosiers the Poems) of only basketball poems, published by Palooka Press, and the other a full-length collection (Headhunting and Other Sports Poems), a wide variety of sports poems, published by Turning Point Books. My memoir, Outside Shooter, about my playing days with Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, and as a victim (I was on the losing team!) in the Hoosiers movie. Some of that might work for you.

Phil Raisor

 On January 6, 2020 at 10:47 AM "Borushko, Matthew via Sport_literature_association" <sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu> wrote: 

   Hello folks,   
   Does anyone have any suggestions for works of flash fiction that engage with sport in some way? I've had a lot of success teaching a few stories from John Edgar Wideman's Briefs ( https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FBriefs-John-Edgar-Wideman%2Fdp%2F0557310040&data=02%7C01%7Csport_literature_association%40lists.ku.edu%7C521e7ff916bf4c4a10be08d793c344e0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C637140339199307983&sdata=VRG7QWGLM6VZWgNoINB9KIQkktmfNp6JnPC0lU6NuI8%3D&reserved=0) in the first weeks of my sports lit class and would love to have a few more authors on there. 

   Thanks in advance,   
   Matt  

       --- 
 Matthew C. Borushko 
 (he/him/his)   
   Associate Professor of English 
 Stonehill College 
 https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stonehill.edu%2Fdirectory%2Fmatthew-borushko%2F&data=02%7C01%7Csport_literature_association%40lists.ku.edu%7C521e7ff916bf4c4a10be08d793c344e0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C637140339199307983&sdata=FbHGGITSOdgZGB6lt8MtZ5YPo0AIpZbso2GY3SS9Gug%3D&reserved=0   

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