Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 38th Installment
Between the normally hapless New York Knicks overcoming the largest finals deficit in NBA history and the world’s largest sporting event coming to North America, I examine today the importance of sports in my life. What have playing and watching taught me about myself?
As a child I was fairly hapless when it came to athletics, other than being one of the fastest kids in my class. I didn’t play football, which in rural Tennessee is a religion, nor did I play basketball. I did long to play baseball but my parents didn’t know about Little League so that didn’t happen. My grandmother, to whom I had expressed my yearning, once bought me a glove and a ball, but the ball was a softball, not a baseball, which ruined the mitt.
Fortunately my parents signed me up for tennis lessons when I was 11 and I fell in love.
I like to say that tennis and academics saved my life when I entered the Sewanee Military Academy after returning from an idyllic year in France. Drilling, marching, getting hazed, and undergoing rigorous uniform inspections were hell for me, and it didn’t help that I was the shortest kid in my entire high school, as well as suffering from the worst case of acne my dermatologist said he had ever seen (acne conglobate). To make matters worse, because uniforms were expensive, my parents acquired castoffs that were too large for me, making me look like Sad Sack in the World War II comic strip.
I was sustained by reading The Iliad in my freshman English class and playing for the junior varsity tennis team, however. At one point I even wrote a tennis poem, which went on to become my only literary publication when it appeared in a national collection of high school poems. I suspect it was influenced by the imagism of H.D. and Archibald MacLeish:
The Tennis Players
Their flapping figures
Expanding and contracting
Like sheets upon a windblown clothesline
Over an asphalt lawn
Of green
My senior year I was #4 on the tennis ladder and won all but two of my matches. Although we had a fine team, we couldn’t compete with Baylor High School in Chattanooga, which that year had Roscoe Tanner (who would one day reach the Wimbledon finals) and Brian Gottfried (who would reach a French Open final and win two French Open doubles). I remember thinking that Gottfried had the most beautiful backhand I had ever seen and determined to develop one like it. He was like a clockwork figure in an exquisite 18th century music box, and when I went on to specialize in literature from the French and British 18th centuries—and learned about the era’s passion for clocks, music boxes, and mechanical toys—I always thought of the moment when I saw Gottfried warming up.
There’s a point to my bringing up 18th century clockwork here because my love of tennis is related to my choice of 18thcentury British literature as my graduate school focus. For a while, I equated that exquisite tennis stroke, and the sport in general, with the exquisite universe that 18th century deists believed an almighty clockmaker had set in motion. Along the same lines, I was fascinated by the mechanical doll Olympia that appears in Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffman; my favorite opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute (which has a music box quality); and my favorite film was Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, which was partially inspired by two intricate 18th century plays, Alfred de Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne and clockmaker playwright Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. In the film, not surprisingly, there’s a character who collects 18th century music boxes.
[I add as an aside that my English professor son, Tobias Wilson-Bates, is doing exciting research on clocks, machines, and time travel literature in the 19th century. Among other things, he is showing that readers resorted to gothic ghost stories to understand the age’s bewildering technological innovations, including the telegraph, electricity, and the steam engine, and that scientists resorted to such stories to conceptualize their discoveries (e.g., Maxwell’s demon).]
Given my love of controlled elegance, is it any wonder that my favorite athlete of all time is Roger Federer, whose balletic grace took him further than it otherwise might have in an age dominated by powerful serves, heavy topspin groundstrokes, and dogged retrieval. Novelist David Foster Wallace once described Federer as “a religious experience,” to which I would only add that it’s a highly ceremonial religious experience.
When I reached graduate school and immersed myself in 18th century figures, I became more ambivalent about my fascination with clockwork. This was partly because I encountered Romantic attacks on mechanistic thinking, such as William Blake’s critique in “There Is No Natural Religion”:
The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
John Keats, meanwhile, accused Newton of having “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colors,” while Percy Shelley distinguished between analysis and synthesis, between “mere reasoning” and the poetic imagination. These critiques I linked up with Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Art of Tennis, which argues that breaking tennis down to its constituent parts actually makes your game worse. Feel your strokes, don’t analyze them, he counsels, and I worried that my tennis suffered because I was too much inside my head.
I also wondered if Marshall McLuhan was correct when, in Understanding Media (1964), he opined that intellectuals can’t be great tennis players because they take a linear rather than a wholistic approach to the sport.
For all my mixed feelings, however, I really am a child of the Enlightenment. And while, for whatever reason, I’m not a great tennis player and have never claimed to be, I am an enthusiastic one. I may not be fit even to untie one of Federer’s tennis sneakers, but my imagination used to soar when I watched him. Years later, tennis analyst Peter Bodo helped me understand why I found him so transcendent.
Bodo uses the concept of sprezzatura to describe Federer. He borrows the idea from Mark Kingwell’s Catch and Release, a book about flyfishing, which defines sprezzatura as follows:
“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .
Kingwell notes that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, finding it in figures like the Cavalier poets of the 17th century (for instance, Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace). Bodo makes the same observation about Federer, observing that he seems like a throwback to a much earlier age. He contrasts him with
the bullishness of Guillermo Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.
I remember being heartbroken when Argentinian giant Juan Del Potro used his power to defeat Federer in a U.S. Open final because I felt like the future of tennis lay in brute force. It was like the contest between the boxer and the yokel that Ralph Ellison describes in the opening pages of invisible Man:
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the hokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior.
Many of my most prized sports-watching moments have been watching Federer play. As for my own skills, although I only have a rough simulacrum of Gottfried’s one-handed backhand, it is the strongest part of my game. And although my tennis wasn’t good enough to make Carleton’s team, my love has for the sport has never waned. Sewanee’s indoor courts factored into our retirement decision, and I now run a doubles league where I schedule 25 ardent tennis players in daily doubles matches. Julia and I have also been paying for our Georgia grandchildren to take lesson for several years now, and my reward is that I can now have extended rallies with the three girls, with my seven-year-old grandson waiting in the wings.
I now switch from tennis to soccer, which all three of our sons played, and to baseball, which engaged Justin and Darien. Darien also played tennis—he can now beat me—while Toby added lacrosse to soccer before moving on the St. Mary’s rowing team. I carry around, like precious artifacts, certain memories of them competing.
For instance, I remember Justin at 13 racing in from centerfield and diving to catch a rapidly sinking line drive. Even more vividly, I remember him that same season hitting a game-tying double in the final inning of a night game. A beautiful Dabney Stuart poem, even though it is about football, helps me frame that moment:
Ties
By Dabney Stuart
When I faded back to pass
Late in the game, as one
Who has been away some time
Fades back into memory,
My father, who had been nodding
At home by the radio,
Would wake, asking
My mother, who had not
Been listening, “What’s the score?”
And she would answer, “Tied,”
While the pass I threw
Hung high in the brilliant air
Beneath the dark, like a star.
Justin may be long gone—sometimes I am like those drowsy parents and don’t think of him for days—but then that moment will unexpectedly fade back into memory. I see him as I see that ball, hanging suspended in the dark sky as the air around it shimmers.
If Justin was lanky elegance, Darien was concentrated power. One moment that stands out was his performance as a Little League catcher in a game that would determine the conference championship. We were up a run with two outs in the final inning when the batter foul tipped a two-out pitch. I saw it as uncatchable and figured we would have to endure another pitch—only to see Darien launch himself, an intense and furious explosion, against the backstop in a desperate attempt to bring it in. He seemed to fill my whole field of vision, and even though he missed it and it would take another pitch to end the game, I remember thinking that there’s nothing Darien won’t go all-out for. I was in awe of him then and I am still in awe of him as that moment pretty much epitomizes his approach to life. I can say of him as Cassius says of Caesar (but without Cassius’s sarcasm), “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
Finally there was Toby, who avoided the limelight that his brothers courted, choosing instead to quietly go about his job. As one of his high school team’s fullbacks, he did his job very well, but for a while I seemed to be the only one who noticed that opposing players never scored on his side of the field. I was deeply gratified, then, when a visiting professional coach from England saw him practicing with the college team, recognized his skill, and chose him for a scrimmage.
A couple of stanzas from Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use” come to mind when I remember Toby on the soccer pitch:
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
What I love about sports is that, along with the wonderful companionship, it provides feedback within a framed experience. Where else do we get such instant results to learn from? Perhaps it’s no accident that I married a woman who played starting guard for Carleton’s basketball team.
Oh, and as for our current sports: my nostalgia for the old Knicks team of Bill Bradley, Clyde Frazier, and Willis Reid has me rooting for New York. And since my first language was French and I have a long history with that country, “Allez les bleus!”
Past Installments of A Life Lived in Literature
A Life Lived in Literature: How It All Began (Sept. 5, 2025)
Early Reading Memories (Sept. 12, 2025)
Childhood Confusion: Reading to the Rescue (Sept. 19, 2025)
Confronting Segregation (Sept. 26, 2025)
School Reading vs. Real Reading (Oct. 10, 2025)
Childhood in Paris (Oct. 17, 2025)
My Time at Sewanee Military Academy (Oct. 24, 2025)
Existentialism for High School Seniors (Oct. 31, 2025)
Why I Majored in History, Not English (Nov. 7, 2025)
My College Search for Authenticity (Nov. 14, 2025)
On D. H. Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening (Nov. 21, 2025)
My Life as a Bildungsroman (Nov. 28, 2025)
Grad School: Literary Baptism by Fire (Dec. 5, 2025)
Early Scenes from a Marriage (Dec. 12, 2025)
Bringing Up Baby in Grad School (Dec. 19, 2025)
Grappling with Racism (Jan. 2, 2026)
Journal of a Young Teacher (Jan. 16, 2026)
Teaching and Reading in Yugoslavia (Jan. 23, 2026)
Life at 40: Barely Controlled Chaos (Jan 30, 2026)
From Secular Humanist to Christian Believer (Feb. 6 2025)
Looking Back at a Lifetime Together (Feb. 13, 2026)
To Ljubljana with Love (Feb. 20, 2026)
Forging a Separate Identity from My Father (Feb. 27, 2026)
“Better Living” Emerged from a Midnight Epiphany (March 6, 2026)
The Golden Years before Tragedy Struck (March 13, 2026)
Using Lit to Grapple with a Death (March 20, 2026)
Lit in the Year following Justin’s Death (March 27, 2026)
My Eldest Son, Named after a Keats Sonnet (April 3, 2026)
Sterne’s Uncle Toby and My Own Toby (April 10, 2026)
After the 2nd Death, a Book Project (April 17, 2026)
Making Lit Meaningful for Students (April 24, 2026)
Horizons Broadened (May 1, 2026)
Obama’s Election and a Blog Launched (May 8, 2026)
Expanding Outward at 60 (May 15, 2026)
On Losing My Father (May 22, 2026)
Cavorting through Literature’s Wonderland (May 29, 2026)
An Academic Life Sidetracked? (June 5, 2026)
Sports as a Spur to the Imagination (June 12, 2026)
