Sports Biblio Digest, 12.4.16: An Ode to a Sports Photograph
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Oodles of 2016 Sports Book Lists; Sports Air Tragedies; An Ohio State-Michigan Classic; The Need To Read
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This is Digest issue No. 65, published Dec. 4, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here.
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The year 2016 figures go down as a memorable one for chroniclers of the art of the sports photograph, and what these images reflect about the cultures and eras they depict.
Earlier this summer, Gail Buckland’s “Who Shot Sports” was hailed as the companion catalog to her curated Brooklyn Museum exhibit about some of the luminaries of sports photography, and their best work.
At the end of the year, Australian author Gideon Haigh’s new book about a famous photograph of cricket legend Victor Trumper was being celebrated well before its official publication.
In “Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the Shot That Changed Cricket,” recently published throughout the world by Penguin Books Australia, Haigh pays equal homage to a key figure in the development of cricket and George Beldam, the Edwardian photographer who took the shot of Trumper during the 1905 Ashes test:
“By subordinating text to illustration, Beldam’s books ‘Great Batsmen’ and ‘Great Bowlers and Fielders,’ in which Trumper and his scores of contemporaries go through their paces, completely reversed the sport’s traditional descriptive economy. Then, almost as quickly, Beldam diverted his autodidact’s gaze to competing enthusiasms. A photogravure of what was originally ‘Plate XXVII: Jumping out for a straight drive’ of ‘Great Batsmen’ hangs in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery; artworks derived from other of his photographs hang in Britain’s. Yet Beldam’s ouevre remains uncurated and uncatalogued; a sizable proportion of his plates have never even been printed.”
I’m still reading “Stroke of Genius” but it’s clear from the early pages that Haigh is as thrilled at these discoveries as he wants his readers to be. A famously staged, 111-year-old picture inspired a fresh inquiry into the work of a renown photographer. Due largely to his many books not only about cricket but golf and tennis, Beldam is better known than Trumper, whom Haigh said “left no memoirs . . . left no papers” and who hardly made any public statements.
Beldam’s work, on the other hand, continues to reveal what Trumper embodied, in ways that words cannot express, as Haigh continues:
“The expressive photograph, argues the philosopher John Berger, works dialectically . . . Beldam captured the idea of Trumper for generations to hand on, and it has endured into the era of Instagram.”
I’ll have more thoughts about current appraisals of sports photography in a post coming shortly, but here’s some of the praise for “Stroke of Genius,” and I thank my Australian readers for letting me know about this very important, and thus far most enjoyable book:
The Australian: “If you were to read only one book to understand why this transplanted colonial game has become Australia’s national obsession then this should be it;”
Sydney Morning Herald: “A critical biography of a great photograph;”
ESPNCricinfo: “This may be the book Haigh was destined to write, and he has not been overawed by the occasion.”
And here’s Haigh in the September issue of Cricket Monthly, about the challenges of undertaking this project:
“To write about any figure of the past is essentially to make a claim for them, to make a mission of substantiating their significance. In sport, the allure is of great deeds, stirring victories, public approbation. Yet legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy. And to track the Trumper story through the obligatory sources is a little like entering a hall of mirrors. Everyone is quoting everyone else. Stories and their origins have long since parted ways. One channels, instead, impressions.”
Sports Books Lists for 2016
“Stroke of Genius” was included on Sports Biblio’s 2nd annual list of notable sports books, and it’s the first of several year-end posts we’ll be rolling out in December (other categories: biography/memoir, sports history, and sports and culture). As I noted in the introduction, it’s a very subjective lists, as these things invariably are, which is part of the enjoyment of reading through them.
I could have (and wanted to) include more than 15 books, and my criteria may be too open-ended and uneven, but ultimately the individual reader is the best judge. Other listings of top sports books for 2016 are piling up, and here’s what we’ve collected thus far:
Topping Huw Richards’ choices for The Guardian (U.K.) is Jonathan Wilson’s book about soccer in Argentina, “Angels With Dirty Faces,” as well as “Stroke of Genius;”
Tom Hoffarth was kind enough to include the Sports Biblio notables among his holiday list recommendations; he also recently read “Showboat,” Roland Lazenby’s new biography of Kobe Bryant, and did this Q & A with the author, and included links to reviews of the book;
Marc Tracy, a college sports correspondent for The New York Times, rounds up his favorites for the year, ranging from high school football to American soccer fandom to Muhammad Ali’s last fight;
Ross Arkin of The Christian Science Monitor selected a dozen books to highlight, with links to excerpts;
Waterstones has produced suggestions with gift-giving in mind, with easily searchable categories, including sport-by-sport;
At The Irish Times, Malachy Clerkin picks his six best books of the year;
Another book list from Ireland, but Conor Henegan’s is a global feast of options, so many that he put together a second list, a blend of current and classic titles;
Author Jeff Pearlman has unfurled his “10 sports books you need to read” as he works on his next project, a history of the U.S. Football League. His recently published Brett Favre biography “Gunslinger” was also on the Sports Biblio notables list, and we’ll be posting a review shortly.
A Few Good Reads
The deadly crash this week of a chartered airplane carrying members of the Brazilian soccer club Chapecoense is the latest in a litany of accidents involving sports teams, and soccer clubs in particular. What is more recent is the chicanery of “fake news” stemming from that tragedy. While it’s been been repudiated it’s hardly been eliminated;
Friends and family members who suffered from earlier disasters endured much more than the immediate shock of devastating losses. As Jeff Connor’s 2007 book “The Lost Babes” illustrates, some loved ones of Manchester United’s “Busby Babes” felt embittered and betrayed at how the club was rebuilt and that their memories of the victims were cast aside in the process;
At Sports On Earth, Will Leitch argues that “fake news” in sports is a lot harder to pull off than in politics;
Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year for 2016 is LeBron James. In an Olympic year, that’s something of a surprise;
Last week’s Ohio State-Michigan game was a classic, and not only for that storied college football rivalry. John Bacon, author of two books on Michigan football and a journalism instructor at the Ann Arbor university, writes at The Post Game about the need for great rivalry games like this one, even if his own team suffered a bitter defeat;
Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell hash over the future of American football, and in particular the NFL variety, and it's the delightfully (and sometimes maddeningly) rambling conversation you’d expect from these two;
The new Collective Bargaining Agreement in Major League Baseball has some fascinating components, according to Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, but some think it’s just an interim papering-over of differences that may not prevent future labor unrest;
Gregg Doyel on how Purdue basketball legend Rick Mount and his alma mater are sort-of warming up to each other again, after decades of unresolved differences;
At the New York Post, Jon Hart on how “Pudgie” Walsh, the Knute Rockne of Brooklyn and who died in September, kept amateur football alive in the borough for decades.
The Need to Read
For The Wall Street Journal, Will Schwalbe, author of the upcoming “Books For Living,” on the essential benefits of books, which are no mere luxuries: “They demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won’t change the words on the page;”
At First Things, Rachelle Peterson writes along similar lines on the joys —and imperatives—of revisiting old books: “Reading classics is humbling. Myopia becomes impossible. Millennia of human history unfold with the pages of books—and with an authenticity that no textbook or documentary can mimic. . . . . Old books remind us that human nature persists across time;”
At Longreads, an excerpt from Keith Huston’s “The Book,” on the dirty work of developing parchment, a process that took place over hundreds of years and spanned many civilizations;
From the always-excellent Atlas Obscura, a compendium of examples of “bibliomania,” a late-1800s European book-collecting obsession that some regarded as an illness and which formed the grounds for a successful legal prosecution against a klepto librarian in Munich;
At Read It Forward, Jonathan Russell Clark delights in living during a time and in a world with too many books.
