A Story As Summer Fades; The Art And Grind Of Sports Labor
The Labor Day holiday weekend more or less marks end of summer, although in much of the United States the weather remains hot and stifling.
School is back in session, football season has arrived and leisurely months have passed for more seemingly productive activities.
Writing at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone revisits a classic short story by John Cheever that harkens back to that time of the year, and also to an era in which American suburban life was becoming increasingly depicted in the writing arts.
“The Swimmer” was first published in The New Yorker in 1964, before being collected, most recently, by the Library of America, and the becoming the subject of a film starring Burt Lancaster.
Ripatrazone places “The Swimmer” highly in the short fiction pantheon of the time, and the story has been a familiar offering in college writing courses:
“It is a love letter to youth and sport; document of mid-century Protestant despair; a metaphor for our seemingly perpetual American economic downturn.”
The larger theme of “The Swimmer” is fixated on the suburban provincialism experienced by a wealthy character oblivious to its soullessness. Cheever paints the delusions of “Neddy” early on:
“His life was not confining and the delight he took in this observation could not be explained by its suggestion of escape.
“He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure. The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty.”
Ripatrazone notes that even Cheever found writing the story emotionally painful. But a reader who can handle the heartbreak will be rewarded:
“Allow the story to bring you back to the temporary innocence of July and August. Experience the deep melancholy of its final paragraph as you get ready for the cold months ahead, but don’t worry: there is always next summer.”
Sliding, Sputtering, Surviving Into September
For fans whose baseball teams are well out of the playoff picture (raise your hands, everyone in Braves Country), the last month of the season feels pointless, unless the young call-ups offer a more hopeful glimpse of the future.
Whether you’re rooting for a playoff team or not, Barry Svrluga’s “The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season” (Penguin Random House) is perfectly timely right now. He covers the Nationals for The Washington Post, and his story is as much about the off-field travails those in a professional baseball organization, including the family lives of players, as what transpires on the diamond.
In a review for The Wall Street Journal, Will Leitch wishes Svrluga would have done more than simply chronicle the "hermetic lifestyle” of baseball pros, in particular to examine “how this relentlessness affects their psyches.”
It’s a sentiment that could be applied to those laboring in any sport, anywhere, of course, and major league baseball players are paid very, very well to ply their trade.
The man who made the present-day labor economics of baseball possible has been the subject of quite a few books. Most recently, in “Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary” (University of Illinois Press), Robert F. Burk focuses on Miller’s background as a labor economist as a prelude to leading the MLB Players Association.
At U.S. Sport History, Alexander Hyres writes that Burk's book is accessible for non-academic readers but thinks the author missed the chance "to critically evaluate the impact of Miller's tenure on the players and baseball's public image."
It’s So, Shoeless Joe
This week, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred decided he will not reconsider reinstating “Shoeless Joe” Jackson so he might become eligible for the Hall of Fame.
At ESPN Los Angeles, Arash Markazi talks to a woman in Greenville, S.C., who maintains a shrine to the Black Sox figure and who just wants him off the ineligible list, Cooperstown be damned.
Arlene Marcley admits she’s not a baseball fan, but remains “infuriated,” 94 years after Jackson’s banishment by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that the very first commissioner “had absolutely no respect for the American Constitution and common law.”
Good news for the Hoophall
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which has been in financial trouble for years, now has a surplus of $750,000, reports Ron Chimelis at The Republican in the museum’s hometown of Springfield, Mass.
The 2015 class of inductees, which goes in next week, includes Tom Heinsohn, George Raveling, John Calipari, Spencer Haywood, Dikembe Mutombo, Jo Jo White and Lisa Leslie. One of my favorite events on the sports history calendar, bar none.
Another Maraniss earns book award
First-time author Andrew Maraniss is set to receive one of the South's best-known book awards.
On Sunday, he will be honored at the Decatur Book Festival near Atlanta with the Lillian Smith Award for his book "Strong Inside" (Vanderbilt University Press). Maraniss, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Maraniss, detailed the story of Perry Wallace, who broke the color line of Southeastern Conference basketball at Vanderbilt in the late 1960s.
Lillian Smith was a white writer and the author of "Strange Fruit," a 1944 novel about interracial romance in the Jim Crow South. The award named after her is given to authors whose works explore topics of racial and social justice.
Off the Sports Grid
Randy Kennedy rounds up all kinds of labor-related art for the holiday.
How Edmund Wilson’s idea for the Library of America almost didn’t happen.
The National Book Festival takes place in Washington this weekend, and portions can be seen on C-SPAN's Book TV. Svrluga is one of the few sports book authors on the schedule, but what an incredible event that's on my bucket list.
One of the reasons I haven't been there is that the NBF runs the same weekend as previously mentioned Decatur Book Festival, which concludes on Sunday. There's not a sports track this year, but with more than 600 authors and presenters, it's billed as the largest independent book festival in the country.
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