Word: jock
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...disguised autobiography known as the nostalgia-trivia game, including a play-byplay account of how Howard Ehmke almost (but not quite) pitched a no-hit game for the Red Sox on May 28, 1924. A fan as in fanatic, Michener further demonstrates the dread total recall of Jock Lit in reporting his meetings with everybody from Montreal Canadiens Goalie Ken Dryden to Fleurette Rigby, a four-year-old minicar racer...
...Jock Lit man of letters must also let his reader know he is not just a sportswriter. Sooner or later he will bring the smell of the library to the bleachers, as well as vice versa. To introduce a tone of scholarship−take that, Red Smith!−Michener compulsively piles up statistics on matters ranging from the death rate of ex-athletes (they live a couple of years less than the rest of us) to the win-loss records of Big Ten football teams and the average salaries in professional sports (as of 1974, basketball led with...
Still, it is by his social theories that the new Jock Lit author tries finally to establish authority. The rambling nature of Michener's essay−chapter headings range from "The Media" to "Government Control"−allows him plenty of room for obiter dicta. They are all too predictable. Solemnly he warns against "the jungle of juvenile sports competition." As if it were a late bulletin, he announces that professional sports have become too violent ("I am worried about ice hockey"). He also worries about women athletes' vulnerability to foot injury, but he is, of course, for women...
...Michener is the evangelist of sports−Jock Lit's Billy Graham−Novak is the theologian. "Sports is. somehow, a religion," Novak declares, and happily settles down to his priestly duties. Words like "ritual," "legend" and "myth" labor in overtime. "Grace" takes on a double meaning. Old George Blanda is compared to Ulysses as he copes on "the green oval floor of the amphitheater" otherwise known as a football field. The "unforgettable stance and fluid swing" of Joe DiMaggio cannot be celebrated without cosmic theorizing. "Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
Killing the Fun. It is as if violence in sports has found a parallel in the violation of style by a Jock Lit author like Novak, who has written with consider able grace and intelligence on the equally treacherous subject of American politics (Choosing Our King). For sports' new and embarrassing lovers are not so much wrong as excessive. The shrill use of "joy" and "fun" and "pleasure" in the titles and texts comes to sound as suspect as "honest" in the name of a used-car dealer. Jock Lit authors are so deadly serious they kill...