After Richard Ford's first two novels failed to make a splash, he got a job as a reporter for New York magazine Inside Sports. It folded in 1982, and when the magazine Sports Illustrated did not take him on, he went back to fiction. The novel that came out of all this was The Sportswriter, in which a failed novelist, Frank Bascombe, comes to terms with the death of his son and the end of his marriage. Bascombe early on sums up the moral of his trade: "If sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret." Ford had little to regret about the novel. It made the breakthrough for him, and one of its sequels won a Pulitzer prize.
American novelists have often turned to sportswriting when they want to get serious. Maybe the best sports novel ever written is Moby-Dick – taking sport as a kind of job. Moby-Dick really is a novel about whaling, its history and characters, the science behind it, the techniques and traditions. Part of its appeal for Melville was that it allowed him to talk about "terrible, searing regret" – Ahab loses his leg to a whale and spends the rest of his life looking for revenge.
Melville may have been the first but he wasn't the last American writer to stake his claim to authenticity by taking on the sporting life. The critic Philip Rahv once distinguished between the redskin and paleface traditions in American letters. Paleface writers, such as Henry James and TS Eliot, belong to the "thin, solemn, semi-clerical culture of Boston and Concord"; redskins inhabit the "lowlife world of the frontier and big cities". Hemingway is the classic redskin and wrote about fishing and bullfighting to prove that his knowledge of life wasn't confined to books. But there are other American writers (most of them men) who have used sports to claim something a little different: that they understand America.
Fitzgerald gives Gatsby connections to the sporting underworld, the backroom dealers who helped to throw the 1919 World Series, to show that in other aspects of his life Gatsby has no illusions. In Underworld, Don DeLillo opens with the last game of the 1951 baseball pennant race, between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The Giants win – it later emerges that they've been stealing pitching signs. Within a few years both clubs desert New York for California and DeLillo uses this moment to show something about American corruption. Part of the attraction of sport is that it offers the novelist a vivid mechanism for the making of plots: the swing of a bat, the flight of a ball, the drop of a catch make visible the mysterious forces that shape our lives. This is where it went wrong, here.
Baseball has traditionally been the sport of choice for the American writer: it has the longest traditions and it offers the most (by way of statistics) to a detached analytical mind. There's also the fact that American football is too violent and dangerous for casual participation. And when most of the last generation of great American writers were growing up, basketball was a second-tier sport, which it isn't now. Even so, when Updike in 1960 wanted to write about the way an ordinary American couldn't escape his dead-end life, he turned to basketball. In an afterword to Rabbit, Run, he explained that "Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in – a ticket to the America all around me". For people such as Rabbit, growing up involves coming to terms with the fact that everything you used to care about, defined you and gave you pleasure doesn't count any more. As he puts it: "I once did something right. I played first-rate basketball. I really did. And after you're first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate." Forty years on, when Philip Roth wanted to describe a similar coming down, in American Pastoral, he also turned to basketball: "Swede" Levov was, like Rabbit, a star high-school athlete.
Why do Americans take sports writing so seriously? The history of this has to do with Frank Bascombe, or rather, with the disappointments of Richard Ford. In 1960, an Englishman, Andre Laguerre, took over a failing magazine in New York. Sports Illustrated had been losing money since its launch six years before; the early issues had been devoted mostly to upper-class hobbies such as yachting.
Laguerre had a number of ideas to ramp up sales. He gave space for in-depth reporting; he was also among the first editors to identify the growing interest in American football. The physicist Ernest Rutherford once wrote that it is only a highbrow in the worst sense of the word who doesn't appreciate the real swells. Laguerre brought in the highbrows. When Sports Illustrated sent a staff photographer around the country to capture images of American kids at play – on its public basketball courts – they chose for his text the famous opening of Updike's Rabbit, Run: "Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."
Martin Amis once praised Saul Bellow for his high style: "To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the 20th century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work." But what distinguishes Bellow's style is the way he mixes high and low: the language of the academy with that of the street hustler, which owes a lot to sports. When his fellow Chicagoan Carl Sandburg (like Bellow, a literary heir of Walt Whitman) wanted to sing the praises of his home town, he turned to the language of baseball: "Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the soft little cities…"
Why didn't something similar happen in England? George Orwell, in an essay on Dickens, wrote that "in England, for mainly geographical reasons, sport, especially field sports, and snobbery are inextricably mingled". The most significant English sporting novel of the first half of the 20th century is probably Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Sport for Sassoon is also a way into the national character: it roots his protagonist, George Sherston, in place and class. But it doesn't offer what it seems to offer Harry Angstrom: a way out of the tangle of circumstances and personal limitations that imprisons him. Probably the closest English equivalent to Rabbit is Colin Smith from Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Smith's prison is literal – the Essex borstal – and though running gives him a sense of freedom, the only way he can express it is by deliberately losing. His world is divided into those with the "whip hand" and those without, and sports for him is just another way of drawing the line.
Rabbit, Run is also a novel about class, and American sports have their class and racial alignments, too. Updike probably chose basketball for Rabbit because it's less Waspy than tennis or golf. Even so, the class lines in American sports are not fixed. Basketball is played by inner-city blacks and rural whites. American football grew up on the playing fields of east coast prep schools, but early on it also became a way out of poverty for the working classes. Baseball calls itself America's pastime, and its fans are harder to place, running from the blue-collar Irish living east of Fenway Park all the way up to Harvard.
There are a number of reasons for this. American sports went professional early, and without any of the splits between professionals and amateurs that cricket and rugby suffered from. And then there's the system of college sports, which turns every high-school star into a local hero, admired equally by the honours student and the dropout. To find an English equivalent to the rivalries of high-school football in Texas, you probably have to go to the Eton/Harrow cricket match; but the one is drenched in class tradition, while the other takes up the Friday nights of entire towns. It's still possible for American writers to use sports as a lens to examine the whole society, as Tom Wolfe attempted in I Am Charlotte Simmons.
But do they know what they're talking about? The New Yorker recently published excerpts from Bellow's correspondence, including a letter to Bernard Malamud. Malamud was a year older than Bellow and like him had spent the bulk of his career fictionalising the predicament of the Jew in America. But his most recent novel was different. Bellow wanted to console him over some of the critical reviews of The Natural, one of the most famous American sports novels ever written. "The baseball experts landing on your 'natural' with both feet," he told him, "are... sinners against imagination."
Bellow himself once tried to describe the greatness of Michael Jordan. In Ravelstein, he wrote: "Ravelstein's young men were well up on basketball. In Michael Jordan, of course, they had a genius to watch. Ravelstein felt himself deeply and vitally connected with Jordan, the artist. He used to say that basketball stood with jazz music as a significant black contribution to the higher life of the country – its specifically American character." The trouble, from an athlete's point of view, is that none of this explains why Jordan is better than the next guy. It's all imagination. Novelists make bad experts and their descriptions of sports tend to be no more reliable than their descriptions of other jobs. Richard Ford may be right that sports writing teaches you about the searing power of regret. But the lesson sports playing teaches is that the other guy is better than you for a number of reasons, some of which you can do something about.
One thing has always worried me about the opening of Rabbit, Run: when Harry Angstrom joins the boys at their game on his way home from work, he doesn't take off his double-breasted jacket. It isn't easy shooting a basketball in a double-breasted jacket.
