Sports Biblio Digest, 5.19.19: The Running World’s Man of Letters
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: Jackie MacMullan; Shoeless Joe Novel; An African-American Sports Artist; Books on Sports, Sex and Gender
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Roger Robinson got hooked on running as a boy, as he watched Emil Zátopek race to unexpected glory in the 10,000-meter run at the 1948 London Olympics.
That first-hand witnessing, at the age of nine, compelled Robinson to embark upon his own accomplished running career, especially as a masters (over 40) marathoner for Britain and New Zealand, and as an author, commentator and historian of running.
In 1987, he married Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run in the Boston Marathon, earned a doctorate from Cambridge University and was for many years a literature professor.
Robinson’s life has been brimming with running from just about as long as he can remember. Now 80 years old, Robinson hasn’t slowed down much in his pursuit of new ways to communicate the importance of running.
At Outside Magazine, 1968 Boston Marathon winner Amby Burfoot offers this appreciation of Robinson and his latest book, “When Running Made History” (2018, Syracuse University Press).
There’s also a recent interview with Robinson at the New Books in Sports podcast.
Burfoot explains how Robinson “has a knack for showing up at pivotal movements” in the evolution of running, recounting the exploits of Abebe Bikila, Filbert Bayi and the Avon Women’s Marathon that led to the introduction of a women’s marathon race at the Olympics in 1984.
Robinson also is eloquent on the subject of Meb Keflizighi, the Eritrean-born marathoner who became a U.S. citizen and trained for years in his adopted country before winning a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics.
In winning the first of three New York City Marathon races in 2009, Keflizghi was the first American man to do since 1982. Infamously, sports business writer Darren Rovell quipped that Keflizighi wasn’t a “real American,” comments for which he later apologized.
Keflizighi's 2009 victory came against the backdrop of a wave of mass migration of many people in Africa, Robinson wrote, “with millions desperately seeking opportunity or safety, received often with fear and hatred.” That win “reads as a defiant riposte. A refugee, he is a member of a large immigrant family making huge contributions to American society.”
As a citizen of New Zealand who also resides in the U.S., it’s a perspective perhaps only Robinson can offer.
More on Robinson here from Stuff, a New Zealand publication, and a 2013 interview with Athletics Illustrated, also from New Zealand.
Aside from his running books, Robinson has edited books about the novelist Katherine Mansfield and an anthology, The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature.
A Few Good Reads
Please read this terrific Q & A at The New Yorker between Louisa Thomas and basketball writer Jackie MacMullan, formerly of the Boston Globe and now with ESPN, on the NBA, her career and how she’s balanced those demands with being a mother. She talks about how she took two years off to tend to her children when they were young, “and it was great. If I could do it over, I’d do it sooner. I would never get to the point where I had to check my bag to Phoenix and then jump on a plane home. I should have seen that sooner;”
A list of recommendations of writing by and about women in sports, by Louise Lawless at the Irish Times, who was appalled at seeing no such titles on display at a Dublin bookstore;
In keeping with that theme, a mother of a sports-minded daughter in Virginia, and a former basketball player, has penned a YA book about a 13-year-old girl who’s the star of her youth team;
At the Los Angeles Times, Tom Hoffarth writes about the new John Schulian book on American sportswriting and Jeff Pearlman, the most recent guest editor of the Great American Sports Writing collection;
And Alex Belth chimes in likewise for the Daily Beast, doing a Q and A with Schulian, who’s asked to name his favorite daily sports section;
At the U.S. Sport History blog, a review of a new novel, “The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe,” by Granville Wyche Burgess;
At the Hollywood Reporter, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar examines African-Americans sports artist Ernie Barnes, a former pro football player whose work is on display through Sept. 8 in a retrospective exhibit at the California African American Museum;
At The Guardian, Alex Hutchinson goes in search of books on the sex-and-gender outliers in sports in the wake of the Caster Semenya saga, and I agree that it’s hard to top David Epstein’s “The Sports Gene” from 2013. While he doesn’t delve into intersex controversies, Epstein is clear about the lifetime advantages biological males have over natal females, which is where the next battle lines in this area will be drawn.
See You Soon
This is an abbreviated newsletter this week, and I will not be publishing next weekend with the Memorial Day holiday in the U.S.
The Digest will return on June 2, and while I’m away I’ll be digging into a new book about Roger Angell, among many on my bookshelf, sports and otherwise.
The weather’s utterly fantastic here in the Deep South in the United States, and I want to get out and enjoy it before a sweltering summer kicks in.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 167, published May 19, 2019.
PLEASE NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. The Digest wil return on June 2.
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