When Sport and Literature Collide

Sport and literature are unlikely bedfellows, perhaps. The preserves, respectively, of jocks and nerds. Brawn and brains. Body and mind. But if we can all agree to move past Cartesian dualism, and think about the ways the body and mind can work as one, or how their interaction can generate useful fiction, the two often sit comfortably, and interestingly, together.

Literature is brutally competitive. Its competitiveness is not as powerfully physical, and therefore immediately obvious, as sport, but it's just as fundamental to the game, and maybe even more cutthroat (success is just as rare for those with literary ambitions, only it’s measured in thousands, rather than millions, of dollars). Both pursuits unite people in the difference of their interpretations: we read texts and react to them in different ways the same way we discuss sports results, and we get obsessed (in a good way) about our favorite authors and teams. Most importantly, perhaps, literature and sport both create different worlds for our minds to inhabit; focal points outside the parameters of the everyday, spaces where the mundane can be finally, comprehensively blasted away, and our minds focused on what they’re truly passionate about.

The two can intersect. The opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld shows how a baseball game (specifically, the final and crucial game of the 1951 National League Pennant play-off between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants) encompasses the same elements of grand-scale human drama as a Renaissance play or a Hollywood blockbuster. The chapter is called “The Triumph of Death” in the novel, as a reference to Pieter Bruegel the elder’s painting, but also to sow the seeds of the book’s engagement with the mythology of death, and the dead. It was originally published as a stand-alone novella in Harper’s with the title “Pafko at the Wall”, name-checking Andy Pafko, the player who saw the home run fly over his head and into history.

The game is narrated from three perspectives: Russ Hodges’s (the voice of the Giants) announcer’s booth, an executive box occupied by Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and J. Edgar Hoover, and from the stands, where a 14 year-old boy skipping school (Cotter Martin) a man skipping work (Bill Waterson) watch the action. Analysis of the chapter usually focuses on the socio-political irony DeLillo looks to exploit: the game took place on October 3rd, 1951, the same day the Soviet Union detonated its second nuclear weapon, confirming to the United States that it had nuclear capability, and for those wanting to reduce the origins of the Cold War to a single day‒  well, giving it to them. The ball game lives much stronger in the popular imagination, the argument goes, even though it was the discovery of Soviet nuclear capability that changed the course of history so profoundly, so DeLillo is pointing out an irony of perception.

This ignores the way DeLillo so gaudily presents the humanity of baseball. There’s a brilliant passage describing Cotter jumping the turnstiles to get into the stadium (ah, for the days before Ticketmaster):

Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and     come down twisted and asprawl [...] Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling     sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a     briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And     in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he'll     land and which way he'll run and even though he knows they will be after him the     second he touches ground, even though he'll be in danger for the next several     hours—watching left and right—there is less fear in him now.

The youngsters scrambling for a place inside is a microcosm for the way the gravity of the game brings most of the world’s population into orbit. Everyone is groping to be a part of it, or more realistically looking for a connexion to it, usually in the form of the radio broadcast. Sport/religion comparisons abound, and more recently sociologists have posited that as regular worship dwindles, sport is replacing religion as the outside-of-self focus du jour, but the comparison comes apart in the hand. There are obvious, logical reasons for religious worship: to help oneself live an ethical life, to gain access to the afterlife, to help the underprivileged.

There are no such reasons for watching sport. Why does it stoke our passion in such a primordial way? I could try explaining that it’s the way it pits people against each other in that singular alchemy of body and mind we call skill, but I know that’s woefully inadequate. Baseball is the apotheosis, in many ways, of the witchcraft of sport: there are individual sports, there are team sports, and then there is baseball. Nationally speaking, I’m an outsider to the sport. I’m used to team sports where players have roughly equal roles, and the team works as a fluid unit. No sport can narrow the focus onto two individuals in such a dramatic way, and I think DeLillo was fully conscious of this when writing about the sporting moment which coincided with the conception of the Cold War.

* * *

If you were to draw a graph with literary output on one of the axes and sporting prowess on the other, Samuel Beckett would probably emerge closest to the top right-hand corner. A talented batsman, he played two first-class games of baseball’s sister sport, cricket, for Dublin University against Northamptonshire, and as such is the only Nobel Laureate to be mentioned in the Bible of cricket, Wisden Cricketer's Almanack. He also used to drive Andre the Giant to school, and their main topic of conversation was cricket.

The freshman Beckett probably played a bit too much cricket, according to James Knowlson’s biography, but another sport would offer itself up as a significant influence in his fiction and drama: chess. He self-translated his second play, 1957’s Fin de partie, into English with the title Endgame. Though he regretted that “Endgame” (which refers explicitly to the closing stage of a game of chess) narrows down the French expression “Fin de partie” (which can refer to the closing stage of a number of different games), the unambiguous reference to the final throes of a game of chess is illuminating: an experienced chess player will enter the endgame knowing whether or not they can win it. An inexperienced player in a losing position will continue to move the pieces around without knowing their fate has already been decided, in a similar way to the play’s protagonists, Hamm (who can’t stand) and Clov (who can’t sit) search for vestiges of meaning in the play’s almost entirely desolate setting.

More explicitly, Beckett’s first published novel Murphy (1938) features a full chess game as part of its text. It’s relayed in full descriptive notation (the older and clunkier style of reporting chess matches before algebraic notation became standard). For anyone with a basic understanding of the rules and objectives of chess, the game is uniquely bizarre. Murphy, the eponymous character, has begun working as a psychiatric nurse at Bethlem & Maudsley Hospital, and finds the mental existence of the patients there preferable to his own waking life. He begins playing a series of games with one of the patients, Mr Endon, making his moves in between rounds.

The game we’re shown runs as follows. I’ve embedded a video, which includes Beckett’s parodic commentary of the moves into the chessboard’s annotation.

It’s a beautiful freak of a chess game. Murphy, who we first meet blindfolded and tied to a chair trying to push his mind into what I’ll clunkily call the negative space, is greatly enamoured by the psychological lives of the patients he meets, and especially Mr. Endon, whom he calls “the most biddable little gaga in the whole institution”. Murphy’s mental disposition is the product of some intellectually heady irony on Beckett’s part: at the time of writing Murphy, he had been reading the work of the Gestalt psychologists with some intensity; this was a psychological movement originating in Germany which, very simply, puts forward the idea that the mind perceives things as a universal whole which is different to the sum of their parts.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, among others, has shown how Beckett’s reading of the Gestalt psychologists manifests itself ironically in Murphy: his Gestalt consciousness perceives the world as a whole of nothingness. It can be tough to conceptualize, but the best demonstration of this is the way the pieces move: Mr Endon’s rotate-- dance, even, in a particular and entrancing pattern. By the end of the game, as Murphy resigns, Mr Endon’s pieces have almost circulated: they’re in exactly the same places they started in, except the King and Queen have swapped places, and his two central pawns have advanced one square each. Murphy’s pieces are strewn across the board in a mess: he begins the game trying to imitate Mr Endon’s nonchalant, cyclical play, but is drawn to the specific urgency of the chess game: he starts making “logical” moves, with the apparent intent of winning the game. His failure to embrace the gestalt of nothingness results in the comedic comment as he offers a Queen sacrifice, which Mr Endon promptly declines: “the ingenuity of despair”.

Beckett was also a keen tennis player, and a little scrutiny yields up the two sports’ shared backbone: their rhythm. Both tennis and chess follow an unbreakable binary structure-- one player makes one move, then the other player makes one move. This pattern continues, otherwise the game ends, and the pattern restarts. Within this overbearing structure, though, anything is possible. Just as chess offers an array of possibilities within a set of very particular, stringent, restrictions, in tennis you can hit the ball however you like-- as long as it makes it back over the net before bouncing twice. Whilst the modern game seems to be moving towards one particular way of hitting the ball (with as much topspin as possible), tennis still offers fundamentally artistic possibilities in the shots the players can make: topspin to push your opponent back, slices to curve the ball away from them, flat shots for brute force, and disguised drop shots where the point is won only partially through the physical action of making the shot: it relies primarily on the psyche-out as the player pretends to hit a powerful, reaching shot.

The psychology of tennis has provided literary possibilities: probably the most famous recent example is David Foster Wallace’s satirical novel Infinite Jest, which takes as one of its settings the fictional Enfield Tennis academy, which highlights the psychological and phyiscal traumas wrought by the intensity of the modern sports academy: steroid abuse, uncontrollable fits of rage, and variously broken dreams. Wallace has written an essay, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”, which brings us back to the question of sport as religion. I don’t buy the comparison, and I’m not sure Wallace does entirely: large swathes of the essay are elegant, finely-detailed descriptions of why Federer is so good, and as Thomas Aquinas would tell you, it’s not really possible to give elegant, finely-detailed descriptions of the glory of the Christian god, for instance. Sport is, again, singular.

* * *

I’ll never be a sports writer, but I’ll still consider myself to be a literary sports fan. After all, I never understood the protagonists of Shakespeare’s tragedies, or indeed any of the Ancient Greek ones, until the 2006 soccer World Cup Final. I want to keep learning from this unfathomable pursuit.