Word: lifeness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...consider sport a metaphor for life is sad. To think of sport as life itself is tragic. None succumb to this delusion more readily than ghetto youth, for whom athletics is both a means of escape and an opportunity for approval. And none have described the process better than Pat Jordan. His own decline as a professional pitcher was recollected in the poignant autobiography A False Spring. Four years ater, he turns from the diamond to the court to watch basketball players yield to the pressures of ambition, and to the damning testimony of their skills...
...three to finish college, is robbed of his chance at glory when a recruiting violation costs Centenary College its opportunity to try for a national championship. McLeod is drafted but fails to make the Chicago Bulls. Having risen too far too fast, all three athletes plummet back to daily life and weekend pickup games, a lot sadder, and a little wiser, in the ghetto where it all began...
Paced like a playoff, Chase the Game derives much of its immediacy from the life and language of men coming to painful maturity. Its power comes from the Ditter conclusion that skill on the playing field is not synonymous with character. There have been scores of books on the superstars of every sport; success Breeds fans. Failure has only a few aficionados, and Jordan is one of the finest. In Auden's phrase, he sings of human unsuccess, and in the song turns case his tories on the defeated into a kind of triumph...
...Jordan, both the loneliness and the boozy camaraderie are a way of life. Returning to his native Fairfield, Conn., after his career with the Milwaukee Braves fizzled, Jordan supported himself and his wife Carol by teaching at a local girls' school. But he also wrote, and, in 1969, sold his first piece, a short story, to Ingenue. Says he: "It was great. I got a check made out to Miss Pat Jordan...
Jordan, who is "making enough to keep everyone in groceries," has no intention of going back, Jim Bouton-style, to baseball, and no regrets about the directions his life has taken. A father of five, he writes steadily away in a rented office in Fairfield, pecking out as few as five pages of finished copy a week. Says he: "I'm the world's slowest writer. I write each sentence three times before I go on to another." But Jordan, who admits that he failed as a pitcher because, among other reasons, he was "always trying...