<div dir="ltr"><div>All, <br></div><div>Please find below and attached Jack Ryan's review of John Schulian, ed., <i>The Great American Sports Page.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><i>
</i><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Schulian,
John, editor. <i>The Great American Sports
Page: A Century of Classic Columns from Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins. </i>New
York: Library of America, 396 pp. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Reviewed by Jack Ryan,
Gettysburg College<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">When I survey the media
knowledge of students in my American Sport in Media and Culture course, a
first-year seminar designed specifically for our Division III athletes, one
question typically remains unanswered: “Name a sports columnist you regularly
read.” I dropped the adjective “syndicated” a few years ago. Reading newspapers
with vigor is not the norm anymore. Now, not reading newspapers has become a
demented badge of honor—and look where we are. <span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Newspapers
were an essential part of civic life, and many readers started with the back
page, the sports section. Charles P. (Charlie) Pierce, erstwhile sports
columnist for the <i>Boston Herald</i> and
current political pundit, sums things up nicely in his introduction to <i>The Great American Sports Page</i> by
recounting his process of deadline revision on Saturday, October 25, 1986, the
night the Red Sox and the New York Mets were playing the sixth game of the
World Series. The night did not end well for Bill Buckner. With precision,
Pierce describes how his column evolved during the topsy-turvy game: “We were
now well into those hours in which the conventional <i>Herald</i> wisdom had it that I should be writing in Mandarin. [the
print deadline was established to reach distant precincts, not the Chinatown
neighborhood where the Herald was printed.] But, then, Bill Buckner—and all the
ridiculous events leading up to Bill Buckner—unfolded, and I had to start all
over again, writing about a world-historical debacle within fifteen minutes or
so left and the Deadline Muse sitting on my shoulder, whispering things like, ‘Don’t
forget that Bob Stanley was out there looking like the bystander at a car
bombing’” (xiv). Pierce laments losing the old print days, when deadlines
mattered and tweets came from birds: “The Deadline Muse is worn out, and the
occupation of daily sportswriting is exhausting itself in tandem” (xv). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Editor
John Schulian’s compendium of newspaper columns contains an astonishing array
of subjects written by an exceptional collection of writers. “The column is
where the stars of the twentieth-century sports page usually conduct their
business,” Schulian declares, “and even with longform now in flower, there are
still those scribes who feel the column’s magnetic pull” (xxi). <span> </span>This assortment of deadline wonders, which
hold up even though decades have passed since many were published, illustrates
the talent of writers who faced a deadline window to produce highly readable
content. None of these columns lag, even though many were written about long
forgotten racehorses and prize fighters. Forty-six writers, starting with
W.O.McGeenhan, a progressive thinker when it came to both female athletes and
boxing, which he called the “manly art of modified murder,” to Joe Posnanski,
once the anchor of <i>The Kansas City Star’s</i>
sports section who produced website content after he left <i>Sports Illustrated</i>. <span> </span>The writers
are ranked in birth order. It’s an all-star lineup and each brings a bit of
history back to readers. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">As
an example, both Joe Palmer (1904-1952), of the <i>New York Herald Tribune</i>, who almost completed a Ph.D. at the
University of Michigan but veered away from academe for print work, and Red
Smith, the elegant and droll columnist for the <i>New York Times</i>, mention Exterminator, a now obscure champion
racehorse, in their respective columns, “Stymie-Common Folks” and “A Horse You
Had to Like.” The horse’s name jumped off the page for me, because it is buried
just outside the city where I was born, educated, and left. To this day, on the
night before the Kentucky Derby, a ragtag group of unprofessional gamblers
detach from their barstools, travel to Exterminator’s gravesite, and as part of
an elaborate ceremony meant to honor the dead and provide money for the living,
select a designee to hurl the numbers of every derby entry toward the horse’s
headstone. The number closest to the grave marker takes the serious money.
Almost every column in this collection contains a memory trigger of some type. <span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Larry
Merchant’s “Poetry in Motion,” which is about opening day at Yankee Stadium in
1973, focuses on the person selected to throw out the first pitch, poet
Marianne Moore. Moore once taught at the Carlisle School, in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania, and she had a student named Jim Thorpe: “He was a gentleman. I
called him James. It would seem condescending, I thought, to call him Jim”
(184). Moore’s favorite Yankee was Elston Howard, and she named her pet turtle
after him in tribute. She found Mickey Mantle gruff and Babe Ruth “boorish.”
The game, the thing apart, reached her: “It’s the dexterity and accuracy that I
like most about it. The nimble movements of the first baseman, the way the ball
lights in his glove. The way an outfielder catches one backhand. But I don’t
like the double play; the execution is nice, but someone is always
disappointed” (184-185). Linking a poet, a city, and baseball team inside a
sport column made sense to the iconoclastic Merchant.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">As
the subtitle of this collections indicates, all the greats are here: Damon
Runyon, Grantland Rice, Shirley Povich, Jimmy Cannon, Dick Young, Jim Murray,
Bud Collins, Tom Boswell, Ralph Wiley, Jane Leavy, Mike Lupica, and Michael
Wilbon. Schulian, though, revives lesser-knowns like Wells Twombly, who
believed that words could take readers to places television could not go, and
who famously cutoff an unproductive interview with Reggie Jackson by telling
the slugger that he was as good a writer as he [Jackson] was a homerun hitter
and if he wanted an interview, Jackson would have to call him. Writing after
the untimely death of the great Roberto Clemente, Twombly equates the
incomparable Pittsburgh Pirate with the physical world: “In nature, there are
certain movements so swift and graceful that no mortal can adequately describe
what has taken place….No man living is skillful enough to describe exactly how
Roberto Clemente moved through the meadows of our land for 18 summers. His was
a special style and grace. It was smooth motion, fluid and compact….No athlete
of Clemente’s quality has been taken for granted quite so shamelessly”
(191-192). <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">“The
Medal” by Robert Lipsyte also contains the power of heightened culture
observation: “[Dick Tiger] had wanted to return the medal [Member of the Order
of the British Empire] for some time, he said. But it was not until he read two
weeks ago that John Lennon, the Beatle, returned his O.B.E. for reasons that included
Britain’s involvement in the Nigerian civil war, that he decided to mail back
his medal” (205). Tiger, a boxer of Nigeran descent, who won two world
championships, the middleweight and the light-heavyweight, is a name that not
many fans, even boxing fans, would recognize. Lipsyte’s piece brings him back,
and connects Tiger to a moment in the history of post-colonial liberation. <span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">Every
column in <i>The Great American Sports Page</i>
stands as a reminder of what we no longer have: newspapers that “monitored the
heartbeat of everyday life” (xvii). No matter the writer, from the rightwing
lugnut Dick Young to the former rock’n’roll critic Tony Kornheiser, the sports
columnist had an audience at breakfast tables, in shift-break rooms, in subway
trains, on buses, and on commuter trains—everyone took the news and the
opinions for better or worse. Bill Plaschke’s 2001 column about a reader, “Her
Blue Heaven,” exemplifies how columnists could extend their work when the
subject demanded it. Not held to a word count, Plaschke offers a story that
countervails the skepticism that professional sports breeds. Plaschke sums up
an unanticipated discovery with emotive style: “It is the same fight the sports
world experiences daily in these times of cynicism and conspiracy theories. The
fight to believe. The fight to trust that athletes can still create heroes
without rap sheets, virtue without chemicals, nobility with grace” (352).<span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif">The
collection is a reminder of things that went wrong, like the Dodgers leaving
Brooklyn, Muhammad Ali being stripped of his title, the National Football
League ignoring its veterans, and baseball players behaving badly. However,
these columns also underscore moments of magnificence: the miracle of Coogan’s
bluff, Jim Murray’s lost eye, Larry Brid’s description of Michael Jordan, and a
tribute to Buck O’Neil. Every column in this compilation is worth reading, and <i>The Great American Sport Page</i> belongs on
the shelf of any quality sports library.<span>
</span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:0.5in;line-height:200%;margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;font-size:12pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:200%;font-family:"Times New Roman",serif"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
</div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past<br><br>Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.<br>Professor of History<br>Book Review Editor<br><i>AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature</i><br>Ashland University<br>Ashland, OH 44805<br>USA<br></div></div></div></div>