"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
Some Insights into Sports Figures in
Modern American Literature
By R. W. REISING
"Where have all our heroes gone?" means to the end, meaning the girls
queries Country-Western singer Bill and the good times," successors, acAnderson on his Decca recording of cording to the balladeer, unqualified
that title, and in responding to the to merit the plaudits of American
rhetorical question he hastens to allege sports enthusiasts.
But Anderson is obviously parochial
that sports figures worthy of admiration are among those conspicuously as well as simplistic in his tuneful inabsent in modern America. Gone, he dictment of current-day athletic stars."
points out, are Jesse Owens, "who Either accidentally or intentionally, he
showed Hitler," Joe DiMaggio, "who fails to concede and consider the presproved that nice guys can finish first," ence on the contemporary sports scene
and Stan Musial, "who never had an of performers basically similar to those
unkind word for anybody." Successors of a generation ago. Golfer Arnold
to those luminaries are of a radically Palmer, with his ever-faithful and everdifferent stripe, he chants-"the
base- growing "Arnie7s Army," certainly is
ball player who got involved with gam- athletically and morally akin to Owens,
blers and the football player who said DiMaggio, and Musial. So, too, are
that football was not the end, but the basketball stars Jerry West, "the personification of humility,"l and Bill
Bradley, a scholar-athlete worthy of
applause from any sports fan, past or
About the Author
present. Likewise, football stalwart
Dr. R. W. Reising is currently Associate
Professor of Secondary Education at Vir- Bart Starr, recently honored by Presiginia Commonwealth University. His doc- dent Nixon, possesses attributes, athtoral dissertation in English Education, completed at Duke University in 1969, explored letic and otherwise, which qualify him
the relationship of athletics and literature. for hero status, as does another quarHe has written for numerous journals, including Studies in Short Fiction, The Clear- terback, Daryle Lamonica:
ing House, and Peabody Journal o f Education, often on that relationship; and he has
reviewed for several others, including The
University Bookman. Prior to his full-time
teaching assignments, he worked in intercollegiate baseball for nine years, compiling
a 106-89 record as a head coach. Presently
he is authoring, with Norman M. Hunter,
an anthology of sports literature for use in
the high school classroom.
...
Lamonica
is i n many ways a
throwback t o the type of pro athlete
the nation idolized i n the 1950's-
* I am indebted to Dr. Ralph S. Graber
of Muhlenberg College, with whom I corresponded and talked about the possibilities
of this paper.
QUEST
friendly, patient, smiling. With shortcropped hair and dark, handsome
features, he cultivates and believes
fiercely in his All-America, nice-guy,
outdoors image. 'I don't want to be
like Namath,' he says. 'I want to
project a healthy image to young
kids. Other athletes will go to a bar
and drink Scotch, but I'd just as
soon go down and have a soda
pop.'2
Anderson is unmindful, furthermore,
that at least two of the three heroes of
yesteryear whom he lauds were not impeccable. Although Owens might have
"showed Hitler," he failed to show the
Internal Revenue Service and found
himself in trouble. Although "Jolting
Joe" might have "proved that nice
guys can finish first," he also proved,
at least to the satisfaction of some
knowledgeable sports commentators,
that he could be "moody and aloof."3
For Anderson, there are apparently no
grays, only blacks and whites.
Yet in one significant respect he and
his plaintive song do not misrepresent.
Dominating sports arenas in the 1970's
are athletes who, while just as gifted
as their predecessors, are far more controversial. They have such a propensity
for controversy, in fact, that they have
alienated, or have come dangerously
close to alienating, many of the followers of their respective sports, particularly those who have grown up with
the belief that their idols should gain
fame only because of athletic feats.
Baseball's Denny McClain is perhaps
the most fabled, but closely rivaling
him are luminaries from other sportsboxing's Cassius Clay and football's
Jimmy Brown and Joe Namath (the
player whom Lamonica does not "want
to be like"). Numerous other stars
have proven that they are only slightly
less friction-free-baseball's Joe Pepitone and basketball's Warren Armstrong and Spencer Haywood, for example. Although Silas Bent doubtless
did not have the sports pages of contemporary newspapers in mind when
he argued decades ago that "harmony
seldom makes the headlines," he might
well have had, thanks to the off-thefield exploits of many of today's athletes.
Apologists for such performers
would be quick to contend that the
present age is different and that the
nation's athletes, therefore, have good
reason for being different from their
forebears. Taking their cue from social
critics, some of whom label it "the Age
of Aquarius," others "the Age of Dis~ontinuity,"~
they see it as a time of
unparalleled complexity as well as of
cultural change and social transition,
the ramifications of which are obvious
in all spheres of human endeavor, including the athletic. Those same apologists harbor similar convictions concerning modern American society, on which
a host of supposedly meaningful adjectives have been lavished ("permissive"
and "open" probably being the best
publicized), suggesting that it is one in
which athletes, like all Americans,
should be allowed to "do their own
thing." In short, unlike poet Charles
Weingartner, who strains to "remember . . . when tomorrow was just like
today / And today was just like yesterday,"5 they neither yearn for nor respect such a remembrance but, instead,
"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
pay homage to the current age and
society because they have combined to
produce performers who are not merely
superb when on the athletic field, but,
equally important, "cool," candid, and
controversial when off it.
Emerging simultaneously with and
related to the cult of the "cool," the
candid, and the controversial is a new
genre-a
literature spawned by the
athletic world and committed to ilIuminating "the real thing" of that
world, to use the "mod" slogan of the
Coca-Cola Company (which, probably
unknowingly, borrowed it from Henry
James). Its creators, most of them
sports reporters, ex-sports reporters, or
star athletes themselves, are well aware
of the other shibboleths currently fashionable in the country, and thus they
have made every attempt to "tell it like
it is" and to "let it all hang out." In so
doing, they both reflect and reinforce
the population's desire to know their
athletes-their private lives as well as
their professional ones, their personal
experiences as well as their public
ones.6 These writers maintain that
nothing is sacred, that the intimate
moment should be recorded just as
quickly, and just as graphically, as the
majestic one. As a result, the fables
and frailties of athletes have become a
matter of public record, no less obvious than was Hester Prynne's letter
A-and often similar in other respects
as well.
The history of the new genre is short
but full. Jim Brosnan's The Long
Season, published in 1960, probably
was the first of the type, revealing,
among other things, "The drinking
3
habits of his St. Louis and
teammates (as well as hi own)
. . ."7 during the 1959 major-league
baseball season. But Brosnan7sbook is
tame in comparison with the expos&
that follow. Four years later, Paul
Hornung's Football and the Single
Man, termed by some critics as "kiss
and tell," celebrated his experiences as
a bachelor and, in so doing, upset the
many traditionalists of the day who believed that volumes by and about sports
stars should be "simplistic, hero-worshipping looks at athletes, their marvelous heroics on the field, their gracious
acts and clean living off."s But the age
and the society, not the traditionalists,
were to have their way, for the genre
has thrived in subsequent years. Leonard Schecter's The Jocks, Namath's I
Can't Wait Until Tomorrow-Because
I Get Better Looking Every Day, Bill
Freehan's Behind the Mask: A n Inside
Baseball Diary, Jim Bouton's Ball
Four: My Life and Hard Times
Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big
Leagues, and Johnny Sample's Confessions of a Dirty Ballplayer all prove
that the genre has been a popular, if
not a critical, success. Moreover, exfootballer Dave Meggyesy's recentIy
published Out of Their League, with its
discussions of marijuana-smoking, racism, and homosexuality, provides a
clear indication that the future of the
genre is bright-and
that the appetite
of sports fans for behind-the-scenes information on their idols is insatiable.
Nothing thus far is meant to suggest
that the flourishing genre is completely
without merits. Because many who
have contributed to it are sensitive
4
QUEST
and/or perceptive, it contains much
that is notew6rthy. Eliot Asinof's
Seven Days to Sunday provides a good
example of the insights of which it is
capable. Shortly after New York
cornerback Henry Carr learned late in
the 1967 season of his demotion to
the "injured reserves" list, a demotion
tantamount to outright release, Asinof,
traveling with the team, engaged the
discarded player in conversation:
. . . I listened to the classic story
of the misunderstood victim, complete with well-thought-out details,
rich with incident and insight. It was
all valid, for Henry was a highly
perceptive and rational young man
with a penchant for collecting injustices.
It was all totally beside the point.
'Henry,' I said, 'when I was in the
Army, there was a guy in my platoon who couldn't stand the injustices of the system. Every night he'd
lie in the barracks and tell us item
by item how he had been abused,
insulted, degraded. Everyone knew
he was not exaggerating one bit. It
was true of all of us. The Army
was horrible. It shouldn't surprise
you, then, if I told you the poor guy
became a really lousy soldier. In
fact, he was killed in the very first
landing at Anzio.'
It took a minute, but the message
began to squeeze through.
'Henry,' I added, 'you've been bitching away all your toughness.'
'You're right,' he said finally. 'Man,
you are right.'S
Yet the currently popular genre is
not significant because of the insights
which it conveys. Nor is it so because
it satisfies a public which not only
yearns for it but is willing and able to
pay heavily for it. Rather, its significance lies in the fact that it mirrors an
age and a society that have catapulted
heroes of questionable credentials &to
a position of unprecedented popularity
and esteem. Because neither the athletes contributing to it nor those depicted in it emerge untarnished, because virtually all of them appear no
more saintly than they do sinful, it provides irrefutable proof that anti-heroes,
not heroes, are enjoying a primacy
hitherto not accorded them. The age
and the society demanded them; the
age and the society produced them; the
new genre merely illustrates their pervasive presence.
Yet, such an awareness should mislead no one. Anti-heroes dominate all
of modern American literature, not
merely that brand created by Brosnan
and his successors. Numerous reputable literary critics have argued the
point, among them the distinguished
Dr. George Harper, Chairman of the
English Department at Florida State
University :
. . . the anti-hero is
. . . Often the hero
in the saddle.
of theater or
TV is the bounty hunter, the wild
west desperado whose sins, in the
reflection after half a century or 75
years, do not seem as reprehensible
as they did when Jesse James robbed
trains. Even the dance hall girl of
the western saloon is glorified: Kitty,
the proprietor of the Long Branch, is
the heroine, or anti-heroine (the literature specialists might say)-far
from the heroine of "Smiling
Through."10
Serious modern American writers
"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
who treat athletics in their works are
very much in the mainstream that Harper and others identify. Focusing upon
sports because of their profound cultural significance, they have often and
regularly delineated characters whose
actions and aptitudes show them to be
anti-heroes rather than heroes. A
knowledge of and a sensitivity to life
in modern America, with its complexities, problems, and possibilities, necessitate that those writers make such
depictions. But, again, no one should
be misled. Neither modern America
nor those serious writers who have
elected to discuss sports are responsible
for the creation of athletic stars of
anti-heroic dimensions. The latter have
been a part of the fabric of the nation
as long as sports themselves. In fact,
the most loathsome sports figure in all
American literature appeared long ago
-prizefighter Midge Kelly, the central
character of Ring Lardner's classic
short story "Champion." Critic Walton
R. Patrick's concise description of
Midge, termed "modest and unassumin' as a school girl" by his manager, suffices to show the true makeup
of the .champion: "Lacking even the
faintest shred of human decency, Kelly
is a merciless bully who brutally
punches his way through the world,
landing knockout blows on relatives
and friends as well as on foes in the
boxing ring."ll Certainly, the viciousness of Johnny Sample, the self-proclaimed "dirty ballplayer," pales by
comparison with Kelly's; and, most assuredly, no sports figures depicted by
recognized American writers of today
can rival him.
5
But Kelly is only slightly more despicable than some of the sports personalities created by Lardner's contemporaries. Another boxer, Robert Cohn,
appearing in Ernest Hemingway's The
Sun Also Rises ("the best portrait of
the expatriate intellectuals, American
and British, then thronging in Paris
and elsewhere and seeking escape in
gregarious dissipation,")12 has a competency with his fists, particularly outside the prize ring, which allows him to
win most of his matches but not the
sympathetic treatment of Hemingway.
Both at the novel's beginning and at
its conclusion, Cohn stands isolated
from the expatriate group, headed by
Lady Brett and American journalist
Jake Barnes, around whom the work
is structured. While they search for
pleasures to while away their time, he
searches for acceptance-but
never
finds it.
Equally anti-heroic are two creations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose
The Great Gatsby appeared only a
year before The Sun Also Rises. Golf
champion Jordan Baker appears as
"incurably dishonest," unable "to endure being at a disadvantage" on or
off the course. Tom Buchanan, "one of
the most powerful ends that ever
played at New Haven," home of Yale,
possesses "a body capable of enormous
leverages cruel body" and, more important, proves as the novel unfolds to
be, like his wife Daisy, one of "the
careless people" :
They were careless people, Tom and
Daisy-they smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back
into their money or their vast care-
6
QUEST
lessness, or whatever it was that kept
them together, and let other people
clean up the mess they had made.
. . .13
Undeniably, then, sports anti-heroes
are not a phenomenon unique to the
literature of the day. Characters like
Midge Kelly, Robert Cohn, Jordan
Baker, and Tom Buchanan prove that
serious American writers have long
acknowledged their presence. Nonetheless, there are distinctive, perhaps
unique, forces discernible in the lives
of the anti-heroes populating contemporary works which not only distinguish them from their brethren of yesteryear but also indicate that it is
difficult to be anything but anti-heroic
in today's world. Those forces, writers
aver, are so powerful and perplexing
that athletic stars can hardly avoid reacting unheroically when confronted
by them. Their presence is so ominous
and enigmatic that those buffeted
about by them are often forced to
strive for moral and ethical heights to
which few mortals have access.
The bigness of sports in America at
present perhaps represents the most
obvious of those forces.14 Baseball,
football, basketball, boxing, golf-each
attracts thousands as participants,
coaches, executives, and fans, and subsequently each represents millions of
dollars annually. In short, each is big
business and as such makes heavy demands upon all involved, but especially
upon those participants who seek success and national acclaim. This, Hank
Martin, the protagonist of Wayne
Greenhaw's The Golfer, soon learns.
Like all games, his imposes pressures.
A talented but not a superb player, he
senses those pressures during his fist
years on the links, and once he has
gained a modicum of fame, realizes
that he will never be free of them.
They are as much a part of the sport as
are his clubs-and no easier to discard.
Mike Kutner also senses the pressures of big-time athletics. But he
too is committed to success. The central figure in Asinof's Man on Spikes is
literally that-a
man on spikes, not
merely a man in baseball shoes but a
man trying to race to fame whiie avoiding the gashes and punctures which the
spikes of his sport can inflict. He gives
sixteen years to professional baseball,
yet earns an opportunity in the major
leagues too late in his career, only after
his skills as a player have diminished
and the pressures of the game have
subdued him. In his lone contest with
"the big club," having failed to distinguish himself in his first three trips
to the plate, the thirty-five-year-old
rookie outfielder has one last chance
for stardom. It comes in the ninth inning, with his team behiid, the bases
loaded, in a two-out, two-strike situation :
In a split second he had to decide,
his judgment shaken by his fear of
the umpire. The delicate instrument
of timing was shattered and the balance of his power upset. He stepped
toward the pitch and started his
swing, lashing at the ball with half
a will, half a prayer.
He didn't come near it.
The game was over.l6
His career is over, too. He has
given baseball everything, and in return
"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
it has given him little. He has been
beaten by it, like thousands of others
-by its bigness, by its pressures, by its
fierce competition. Participation has
not made him a national hero-only,
as a fan tells him after his h a 1 strikeout, L L O ~. h. . what a bum!"
But Kutner is not alone in his failure. Other characters suffer the same
fate. Those poetically depicted in "The
Rookies" by Tom Meschery, himself
a professional athlete, are no different,
overwhelmed in similar fashion but by
a different sport, basketball:
Athletes filled with hope and vigor
Try and fail and leave,
Beggared, not enriched.
What they gave was not enough.
No longer does life seem as glorious
As it did a year ago
When stronger and bolder
Each strode the campus hero.
Now in three short weeks
Their bodies beat by hands of tradesmen,
(Less delicate but in their eyes more
fortunate)
They must go to build their hopes
anew.
Their agony is not returning
For hearts that beat this brand of
sport.
The agony is not discerning
What is the end and what is not.16
Some, however, succeed. Some gain
the fame that Hank Martin, Mike Kutner, and "The Rookies" find so elusive.
Yet success does not guarantee heroism. For the relative few who attain it,
like Jimmy Jassy, the protagonist of
David Scott Milton's first novel, The
Quarterback, it often represents only
7
an opportunity to contribute to and
profit from the bigness and the pressures-and,
eventually, to decline in
prowess and thus to relinquish their
positions to younger, more effective
players. A carnal man, with a huge
appetite for the sensual as well as for
alcohol, he eventually goes berserk, permanently injuring his hand when after
five years of stardom he sees his youthful understudy guide his professional
football team to a key win. His failure
to realize that his sport is really not
that at all but is, instead, big business
contributes to his downfall. That failure is also Jim Evans' in another football story, Virgil Scott's "Don't Run,
Don't Pass." Called upon late in his
team's final and most important game
of the season, Evans, like Jassy a
back, fumbles away the ball-and,
simultaneously, his college team's
chances for victory, a bowl bid, and
the retention of the coach. Disregarding the strategy dictated by the situation and reflected in the story's title,
Evans with the snap of the ball seizes
an opportunity for both a long run
and glory, and while he gets the former, the latter avoids hi. It is only
after the stadium empties that the
coach queries him about and informs
him of the significance of his actions:
"What did you think this was, a
game?"17
Budd Schulberg and Rod Serling are
among the many effective writers who
make it quite clear that "the fight
game" is likewise no game at all. As
such, it too has a strong and sordid
propensity to reprimand, exploit, and/
or discard those performers who no
8
QUEST
longer prove financially profitable.
Toro Molina, the giant from South
America in Schulberg's The Harder
They Fall, is one of those performers.
Despite limited ability, Molina enjoys
pugdistic success because of the machinations, legal and otherwise, of his
sponsors, who, after he has fallen out
of favor with them, subsequently allow
him to be pummeled mercilessly in a
non-fixed match. That match, fought
before a huge audience, brings the
sponsors a handsome profit but Molina
only a p i t t a n c e a s well as a trip to
the hospital. While confined, his sponsors sell his contract to a manager who
capitalizes upon fighters who are "on
the way down," not "on the way up."
Thus, as Ralph S. Graber points out,
"Shulberg has superbly shown a bumbling, earnest but hopelessly incapable
man preyed upon by a cold, hard, and
evil society."18
But "business is business" in the
world of professional boxing. This
point Serling makes eminently clear in
Requiem for a Heavyweight, originally
a prize-winning television play and
later a successful motion picture. At
one time the fifth-ranked heavyweight
in the world, Mountain Riveras, the
work's protagonist, eventually reaches
the end of his fistic road, threatened by
blindness. The options available to
him, a sixth-grade dropout, are few.
The one that is imposed by his manager represents, Riveras knows, the
ultimate indignity for anyone who has
enjoyed ring success : eight wrestling
matches, the one-time classy fighter
attired in "an Indian outfit, complete
with feathered war bonnet."l9 He re-
luctantly accepts, the victim of the
parasites whose lack of principles are,
or at least can be, so major a part of
any big-time "game."
Yet, if bigness, with its attendant
pressures, priorities, and parasites,
were the lone force which serious writers treating athletics in the modem
world could discern, their works and
that world would be comparatively
simple-and
more heroes would be
present. However, it is not. Forces of
a distinctively sociological flavor are
also manifest-racial
bigotry, for example. It certainly figures prominently
in James T. Farrell's "The Fastest
Runner on Sixty-first Street," whose
central character, Morty Aiken, "the
best runner, for his age, on the South
Side of Chicago" and "the future
Olympic C h a m p i ~ n , " ~races
~
to his
death at the hands of knife-wielding
blacks. It certainly figures, too, in
Julian Mazor's "Baltimore" in which
Sergeant Lester Boone, a soldier from
Georgia, sponsors but plots and bets
against Tracy James, a likable Negro
heavyweight fighter in his company.
James unexpectedly triumphs in his
Baltimore bout with Young Bartel, the
city's "favorite kid"-yet
earns not
the three hundred dollars promised
him but "K.P. for two weeks solid"
and indefinite restriction to his military
base. And most definitely it figures in
Howard Sackler's The Great White
Hope, doubtless the h e s t play to center on prizefighting since Clifford
Odets' 1937 classic, Golden Boy,
which likewise has powerful sociological implications. Unlike Odets7 work,
whose theme involves the conflict be-
"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
tween "the fiddle and the fist," Sackler's illuminates the plight of blacks
who struggle for acceptance in a society with a double standard. Patterned
after Jack Johnson, the first Negro to
be Heavyweight Champion of the
World (1908-15), Jack Jefferson, the
play's protagonist, refuses to be a
servile "nigger" in a white man's world,
electing instead to be, as Frank McLaughliin states, "a black man whose
style of living contravenes the accepted
scores of the time in which he lived."21
His winning of the championship and
his taking of a white mistress earn him
few friends in America, and subsequently he flees. After his mistress's
suicide, he agrees to a rigged fight in
Havana, where in a grueling encounter
he relinquishes his title to "the Great
White Hope," the savior of a society
which refuses to see Jefferson, and
others of his skin color, as equals.
A second sociological force, environment, is equally potent. Numerous
writers indicate that it can suffocate the
possibilities and potential of those performers unprepared to escape its grip.
Flick Webb, in John Updike's poem
"Ex-Basketball Player" is an example.
Holder of the county scoring record,
Flick "just sells gas" at Berth's garage,
a short distance from the high school
at which he had gained fame. "The ball
loved Flick, his hands were like wild
birds," but now he merely "stands
tall among the idiot pumps" and, "off
work, he hangs around Mae's Luncheonette." As Virginia Busha indicates,
"The tragic waste of a young man's
ability is sharply
in the poem.
It is felt only slightly less sharply in
9
Jay Neugeboren's story, "The Zodiacs,"
one of whose characters, George Santini, "the best athlete" in P.S. 92, "was
always getting in trouble with the
teachers and the
The brother
of Vinnie Santini, an ex-convict,
George possesses fantastic ability as a
baseball pitcher, but ultimately quits
the game and high school for a life of
crime with his brother.
No less tragic, and equally victimized by their environment, are two
boxers, Ernie Munger and Billy Tully,
featured in Leonard Gardner's brilliant
first novel, Fat City.24 From Stockton,
California, they both struggle to transcend the confinement of their bleak existence, to fight their way to something
better. They are destined never to see
the bright lights and the grandeur of
Fat City.
In contrast, Luke Goodwood is.
The protagonist in two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner Robert Pem Warren's
"Goodwood Comes Back" does make
his way to Fat City-but only, nevertheless, to fall victim to his native environment. Success in major-league
baseball overwhelms him. He yearns
for and feels comfortable not in metropolises but in the small town of his
birth. Hunting and fishing appeal to
him far more than do bright lights and
grandeur, and thus he returns to them,
trapped, ironically, by a primitive environment from which he has the athletic resources to escape.
Two other forces of sociological import deserve at least quick mention
because, although obviously as old as
time itself, they have taken on added
dimensions in the present age. Inas-
10
QUEST
much as sociologists like David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny
have convincingly argued that loneliness is very real even among crowds
in modern AmericaF5 it is small wonder that it is equally real among performers who regularly appear before
those crowds. Some of the athletes
previously mentioned are lonely people, painfully lonely ones-Mountain
Riveras, Ernie Munger, and Billy
Tully, for instance. Loneliness propels
them into compromises which detract
from their heroic, or potentially heroic,
stature. Similarly, it is a deterrent to
the heroic possibilities possessed by
Florence Everleave, the tennis teacher
and player around whom Eunice Luccock Corfman structures her 0. Henry
award-winning story, "To Be an Athlete." Unmarried, Miss Everleave devotes her every waking hour to the
game, teaching it and playing it. Only
when she comes to know the dynamic
Hector Ekstein, another college professor, does she sense that hers is a
drab, barren existence, that tennis is
a sterile substitute for the myriad of
human relationships and experiences
found in a rich and rewarding life.
Marital discord, however, can be
just as heroically enervating as loneliness. Especially at a time of changing
values and societal flux does it possess
comparable power to propel athletes
into demeaning compromises. So propelled is Rabbit Angstrom, another
ex-basketball player created by Updike, the heralded author of Rabbit,
Run. Tired of, but tied to a joyless
marriage to an alcoholic and pregnant
wife, Rabbit runs in circles trying to
bring meaning to his adulthood. He
succeeds not in meeting life's challenges but only in running into obscurity, as the novel's final lines poignantly depict:
. . . he doesn't know . . . what to
do, where to go, what will happen,
the thought that he doesn't know
seems to make him infinitely small
and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness. It's like
when they heard you were great and
put two men on you and no matter
which way you turned you bumped
into one of them and the only thing
to do was pass. So you passed and
the ball belonged to the others and
your hands were empty and the men
on you looked foolish because in
effect there was nobody . . . he
runs. Ah: runs. Runs.26
Duke Craig, the professional football quarterback in Robert Daley's
Only a Game also has a joyless marriage, and he, too, seeks a viable alternative. In Margie Berger, separated
from her husband, he finds that alternative; but, ultimately, he must choose
between relinquishment of her and suspension from football. He elects the
latter, painfully aware as "his eyes mist
over and he sees the stadium blurred
through tears" that for him football is
much more than "only a game."27
For others, too, football is not "only
a game." Few sports important in
America today are. Each has its p e
culiar capacity to be tragic as well as
comic, to enslave yet to elevate those
involved with it, to allow them to be
both its prisoners and its guardians.
Each is paradoxical, moreover, not
merely in its ability to evolve an equal
"Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?"
number of winners as losers but in
the skills demanded of its performers,
like those which poet Robert Francis
sees in baseball's "Pitcher" :
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to
aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. H e
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too
late.28
Understandably, then, the paradoxical nature of sports allows them, in
the words of Meschery, to "beggar"
as well as to "enrich" their stars. What
Mountain Riveras' manager says of
boxing is applicable to all sports in
modern America: "The good's greatthe bad stinks."29 Heroes are a part of
the greatness, an inspiring payt; but, as
Bernard Malamud illustrates through
Roy Hobbs, the talented baseball
player in The Natural, it is agonizingly
difficult "to be a hero in a society that
demands that its knights resist the forbidden fruits which the masses of
weaker flesh enjoy."30 A few are able
to resist those fruits. A few have the
courage, compassion, and goodness to
do so-Henry Wiggin, for instance, the
pitcher who narrates all three of Mark
Harris' baseball novels: The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, and A
Ticket for a Seamstitch. But athletes of
11
Henry Wiggin's stature are in the minority as indicated by the literature of
the current age and society.
Yet have they not always been so?
Have any age and any society ever had
a surplus of heroes, those from the
athletic arena as well as those from
other spheres? Is the desire expressed
one hundred and fifty years ago by Lord
Byron, himself a strange composite of
the heroic and the anti-heroic, not
exactly that voiced by men in every
period in history, including the present
problem-plagued one?
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends
forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with
cant.
The age discovers he is not the
true onee31
REFERENCES
1. "West's Spouse Writes Book." The Charlotte Observer, December 26, 1970, 2B.
2. Bruns. Bill. "A Tale of Two Ouarter-backs." Life, LXIX (~ecember 4,
1970), 44-47.
3. See, for example, John Updike's often-
anthologized essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid
Adieu" and Ed Linn's Ted Williams
(Sport Magazine Library).
4. See, for example, Peter F. Dmcker's
book The Age o f Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New
York: Harper and Row, Publishers,
1968).
5. Weingartner, Charles. "Goodbye Miranda. Hello Cassandra." English Journal, LIX (October, 1970), 987.
6. For an interesting discussion of the
American housewife's desire to know
the athletic star both on and off the
field, see Elinor Kaine's "Zeroing in on
a Broad Audience," T Y Guide, 18 (December 5, 1970), 53-56. Apparently, the
American housewife even craves knowledge of "the pro football team's house-
QUEST
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
keeping problems such as laundry,
cleaning, a?!
moving equipment for
away games.
"Does an Athlete Have the Right T o
Tell It Like It Is?" Sport, L (August,
1970), 90.
Ibid.
Asinof, Eliot. "Seven Days to Sunday"
(an excerpt from the book of the same
title). The Saturday Evening Post (September 21, 1968), 35-46, 76-77.
Harper, George. Paraphrased by Pete
Ivey. "Poets, Oboists Proliferate in
Ivey-Covered Towers." The Charlotte
Observer, December 27, 1970, 5D.
Patrick, Walton R. Ring Lardner. New
Haven: College and University Press,
1963, p. 86.
Bradley, Sculley; Beatty, Richmond
Croom; and Long, E. Hudson, editors.
The American Tradition in Literature.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1961, p.
1584.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1953, pp. 180-81.
For an especially perceptive study of
the growth of sports in America in the
present century, see John R. Tunis,
The American Way in Sport (New
York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958).
It is also worth noting that the ClayFrazier championship fight, fought in
March of 1971, may gross about 30
million dollars, a sum that staggers even
the wildest imagination-and
proves
that sports are indeed big business in
the United States.
Asinof, Eliot. Man on Spikes. New
York: Popular Library, 1955, p. 218.
Meschery, Tom. "The Rookies." Over
the Rim. New York: The McCall Publishing Company, 1970, pp. 14-15.
Scott, Virgil. "Don't Run, Don't Pass."
Argosy Book o f Sports Stories. New
York: Pennant Books, 1954, pp. 1-11.
18. Graber, Ralph S. "Boxing as It's
Fought in American Literature." Muhlenberg Essays, undated essay.
19. Serling, Rod. Requiem for a Heavyweight. New York: Bantam Books, 1962,
p. 97.
20. Farrell, James F. 'The Fastest Runner
on Sixty-first Street." Bradley et al., op.
cit., pp. 1674-83.
21. McLaughlin, Frank. "The Great White
Hope: A Critical Evaluation." TCF 7,
undated brochure published by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.
22. Busha, Virginia. "Poetry in the Classroom: 'Ex-Basketball Player."' English
Journal, LIX (May, 1970), 643-45.
23. Neugeboren, Jay. "The Zodiacs." Corky's
Brother. New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1969, pp. 49-65.
24. One critic, Ross Macdonald, goes so far
as to compare Gardner's artistic ability
with that of Herman Melville and Mark
Twain. See Sport, XLIX (January,
1970), 36.
25. Riesman, David; Glazer, Nathan; and
Denny, Reuel. The Lonely Crowd. New
York: Doubleday and Company, Inc.,
1953.
26. Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York:
Fawcett World Library, 1960, pp. 25455.
27. Daley, Robert. Only a Game. New
York: New American Library, 1967,
p. 313.
28. Francis, Robert. "Pitcher." Teaching
Literature to Adolescents. Edited by
Stephen Dunning. Glenview, Illinois:
Scott, Foresman and Company, 1966, p.
40.
29. Serling, op. cit., p. 119.
30. Graber, Ralph S. "Baseball in American
,
(NoFiction." English J o u r ~ ~ a lLVI
vember, 1967), 1 107-14.
3 1. Gordon. George (Lord Bvron). Don
Juan. New YO;^: he ~ o d k r n~ i b r a r ~ ,
1949, p. 8.