Sport Stories

If you were searching for a pastime that was the opposite of reading, you might well hit on sport. Burying your nose in a book is a primarily sedentary and intellectual activity (although proponents of the bizarre discipline that is extreme reading might disagree); sport is of course hugely energetic and physical (although some of us might argue that golf, boules and an arthritic middle-aged kick-about buck that trend too).  The former is an insular and private experience; the latter an extroverted and communal event.

However, this very dichotomy is probably the reason why sports and fiction make such a successful partnership. Confined to their desks for most of the day, it is no surprise that writers fetishise a world of sweat and sociability. Bringing such a tribal activity to life on the lonely page is an intriguing challenge, and sport is in itself a language with a rich seam of jargon to mine. It is also a cultural looking glass, through which issues of class, race, sex, violence and transcendence can be refracted and explored. And however deep the metaphor becomes, the everyman accessibility of sport allows a novel to retain an aura of unpretentious authenticity.

Of course, for all the fancy philosophising, a good chunk of sport fiction is driven by publishers’ bottom lines. The flawed reading/sports division also translates into a classic gender cliché: she snuggles on the sofa with a novel while he plays ball in the park; she talks Austen at the book club while he talks Arsenal down the pub. In the most basic marketing terms, adding a spot of muscle to your novel can help pull in the guys, and many canny authors combine sporting subjects with ‘masculine’ adrenalin-pumped genres such as crime and mystery.

The last four novels in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series, fast-paced thrillers starring a basketball pro turned sports agent, all debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. John Grisham has successfully combined his high-stakes taut plotting with American football in Bleachers and Playing for Pizza. Ex-jockey Dick Francis’s racing crime capers have been bestsellers for four decades. And Nick Hornby’s autobiographical novel Fever Pitch helped ease a generation of non-fiction lads into the joys of well-written, stealthily meaningful bloke-lit.

But sport-saturated fiction is as likely to crop up on an awards shortlist as an airport paperback carousel. Highbrow state-of-the-nation epics have a notable tendency to pin eight hundred pages of philosophy on the whack of a ball.

This is nowhere more evident than in America, and when it comes to literature, baseball truly is the nation’s pastime. For many, W.P. Kinsella’s whimsical Shoeless Joe – the story of a man who builds a baseball diamond for the ghost of legendary players past, adapted into the sentimental Costner film ‘Field of Dreams’  – remains the embodiment of the American dream. Subsequent books have followed Kinsella’s lead to use baseball as a symbol of a gentler, nobler past, but they also temper that wistfulness with an unflinching exploration of now.

Take Underworld. Don DeLillo’s postmodern classic begins with a legendary game between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951, but the trajectory of its home-run ball becomes the organizing principle for a decade-spanning examination of contemporary American life. “The wonderful mystery of the Bobby Thomson home-run ball is in part what prompted me to write Underworld,” Delillo has said. ”People have scrambled over baseballs, fought over baseballs, and if we knew who had that baseball, it’s possible I never would have begun work on the novel.” And last year’s surprise debut hit, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding tracks the rise and fall of protagonist Henry Skrimshander as he strives to go pro. It is based on the story of Steve Blass, a Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher from the early 1970s, but transcends nostalgia to create a highly intellectual and relevant read.

Other sports make high profile appearances too. Joseph O’Neill had great critical and commercial success splash in 2008 with Netherland, in which a Dutch immigrant to Manhattan uses his passion for cricket to build a sense of community in a strange new city. Even Lionel Shriver, who has an uncanny ability to focus her authorly attention on the cultural zeitgeist, used the extreme and sometimes damaging backdrop of the professional tennis circuit to trace the dissolution of a relationship in 2006’s Double Fault. Reading it is as alternately hopeful and harrowing as watching a British tennis pro at a final.

O’Neill has explicitly said that he wrote his book as “an American novel … My first novel as an American novelist”. Chad Harbach is already being compared to current literary kingpins Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – whose novels are, in turn, peppered with sports players and fans. Adding sport to your fiction has evidently become a badge of validity in the American canon, and sport a major fictional trope for exploring contemporary urban life. Why?

Delillo’s comment about Bobby Thomson’s legendary home run gives us a clue. His obsession with the mystery reminds us of sport’s ability to crystallise collective memory in a single searing moment – a moment of coherence in a fragmented world. For transient urbanites without the comfort of religion or close local community, that moment can be everything. And in it’s own way, a great book achieves this same alchemy – bringing readers together in a shared experience that nevertheless remains unique to every individual.

Of course, the impact of shared sporting memories is powerful exactly because they are real: a trigger for genuine emotional recollection. This also accounts for the genre-bending so prevalent in the novels above. All of them, from Fever Pitch to Underworld complicate their fictional credentials by incorporating real sporting events and characters and thinly masked elements of autobiography. Sporting fiction is almost a genre of its own: a unique blend of nostalgia and now, reality and myth.

Personally, I’m a solitary and uncompetitive exerciser who gravitates towards horse riding, running and yoga, so sports lit often doesn’t resonate with me the way it may with real fans. But London’s Olympic year is the perfect time to explore – so what would you recommend?