2010 Sports, Seen through Literature

Sports Saturday – 2010 in Review

Since New Year’s Day falls on a “Sports Saturday” this year, I’ll take the occasion to review the year in sports through the vantage point of renewal. The first year of the new decade had a number of joyous firsts.

It was a year when the city of New Orleans, battered like no American city has been battered, won its first football championship. (My post on “the joy of victory and the agony of defeat” can be found here.)

It was the year that country playing the most beautiful team soccer in the world won its first World Cup. I compared the breathtaking artistry of Spanish to Alexander Pope’s elegant couplets and their win over the thuggish Dutch team to Prospero’s beat down of Caliban in The Tempest.

It was the year when another Spaniard, Rafael Nadal, unquestionably took control of men’s tennis, displacing Roger Federer. I have long been in love with Federer’s beautiful game, preferring it to Nadal’s more athletic style. But I must now acknowledge that we have entered the Age of Nadal, and the Spaniard has assuaged my anxiety (expressed here and here), that big men would come to dominate tennis. Nadal is no more one of these big men than is Federer.

In baseball, the year experienced an outbreak of perfect games and Doc Halladay even had a no-hitter in the playoffs. But the most memorable perfect game was the one that wasn’t—a blown umpire’s call on the final out robbed Armando Galarraga of perfection–leading me to compare him with Gil Gamesh, the brilliant but doomed pitcher in Philip Roth’s Great American Novel.

It was wonderful to see San Francisco win its first baseball championship, striking out “the mighty Casey” Dwight Howard to reach the World Series.n the process. I believe the Giants had the third longest streak in baseball without a championship, and they won that while still in New York.

On the other hand, some things never change. Once again the Chicago Cubs fizzled out, leading to this post on Cub fan suffering. It’s been 102 years since their last championship.  Also fizzling was the Nationals’ star rookie pitcher Stephen Strasburg, which reminded me of Damon Rutherford, the exciting young pitcher in Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association who revitalizes the fantasy league created by one Evelyn Waugh and then tragically is killed by a bean ball.  (Waugh proceeds to go mad.)

Of course, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died this year, prompting me to call him (in reference to T. S. Eliot) no hollow man.

Sports seems to have an infinite capacity to surprise us. Brett Favre came back (at 40) and then he came back again, even after I compared him to a dying bull with the vultures circling overhead. (“While o’erhead with watchful eyes, waiting for the flesh that dies,” Ralph Hodgson writes.) At one point I compared Favre with the man who may one day own his records, Peyton Manning, and explored why Favre makes the better story.  (The explanation lies in our preference for melodrama over cool efficiency, for King Lear over Henry V.)

Our fascination with such stories explains why, of all sports figures, the one who received the most attention from this website was quarterback Michael Vick, making a comeback after two years in prison for dog fighting. Literature specializes in sinners dealing with their crimes, and in different posts I compared Vick with Mac the Knife, the ancient mariner (here and here) and Hester Prynne. Stay tuned to find out how well Vick does in the playoffs—and even more importantly, how well he handles that fickle mistress fame.

Vick wasn’t the only fallen hero story.  Fallen idols Tiger Wood and Mark McGwire got a “say it ain’t so, Roy” post (the reference is to Bernard Malamud’s The Natural). I used Beowulf to defend LeBron James’ decision to leave Cleveland and go to Miami.

One story that riveted the world was the 70-68 Wimbledon 5^th set between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut (the overall match lasted 11 hours and stretched over three days)—an agonizing affair that pushed the limits of metaphor. I found a literary equivalent to the match in a Kinsella baseball novel and explored the limitation of metaphor to capture what occurred.

Football, America’s favorite sport, got the most posts. I compared this brutal game to gladiatorial contests and to a Chicago slaughterhouse (as described by Upton Sinclair).  I looked at how Edith Wharton celebrates football’s manly virtues and imagined Margaret Atwood attacking it on those same grounds.

I examined what Beowulf would do in response the NFL owners’ threat to lock out the players next year without player concessions. And since this is my website and I’ll cry if I want to, I gave what some would consider a disproportionate amount of coverage to my favorite football team, the Indianapolis Colts.

I compared Peyton Manning to Beowulf,  and I wrote an extended comic poem celebrating the Colts’ Super Bowl team. I looked at how their coach, a former English major, uses language to inspire the players.  When Manning went through a rough stretch this year, I compared him to Robert Frost’s ovenbird.

And because the Colts are always paired with their archrivals, the New England Patriots, I compared Manning with Patriot quarterback Tom Brady, seeing Manning as Hector to Brady’s Achilles. I couldn’t resist indulging some Schadenfreude when the Patriots lost last January to the Baltimore Ravens and invoked Thomas Peacock’s mock heroic poem “The War Song of Dinas Vawr”:

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

I also compared Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick to Professor Moriarty.  As much as I dislike the Patriots, I accord them tremendous respect.

Of course, the Patriots this year are seen as the top team in football and New England fans may get to enjoy some Scadenfreude of their own. And so the sports wheel of fortune turns again, as it does continually, year after year. Have a happy 2011.