The Second Coming of the Sports Novel

By contrast, O’Neill’s latest fiction, Godwin, is as geographically expansive as Headshot is self-contained. The story, about an embattled technical writer who leaves the U.S. on a worldwide quest to locate a teenage soccer star, not only takes place on three continents but also covers a host of big-ticket concerns: the corrupt international legacy of soccer, the nature of the global economy, the possibilities of mutualism, and more. It’s also, unlike Headshot, not strictly a sports novel, in that it takes place off the pitch. In this, it’s part of another recent trend in sports fiction: the para-sports novel, which uses the trappings of the sports world to explore various extra-athletic issues.

Bullwinkel’s and O’Neill’s widely divergent books together represent two distinct paths for a long-running but ever-evolving genre. Whereas Headshot keeps the focus local while using an expansive narrative technique, Godwin hops all over the world while keeping its perspective tied to a single consciousness (at a time). These mirror-image strategies each emphasize the intersection of the personal and the global, the ways that what happens in the match reverberates well beyond the pitch or the ring. By drawing on seventy-five years’ worth of lessons from the literary sports novel, Bullwinkel and O’Neill, along with their fellow practitioners, offer up something sustaining for the genre, both a refinement of what came before and a fresh understanding of how sports fiction continues to speak to twenty-first-century lives.

As a sports novel, Headshot delivers the goods. It’s a boxing novel that takes the sport seriously, even if it’s about an octet of teenage girls vying for nothing other than a plastic trophy and the recognition of their peers. Despite the decreasing length of her in-the-ring descriptions in the later rounds of the tournament, Bullwinkel instills a real rooting interest in the outcome. But Headshot also uses the form of the sports novel to explore larger issues, reflecting on the ways that lives are consciously and unconsciously lived. Bullwinkel outlines each girl’s conception of herself as a boxer, which in each case doubles as her sense of her place in the world. “You can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny,” Bullwinkel writes. One of her chief insights into the world of sport is that the framework is all based on an illusion; once an athlete no longer believes in this illusion, once they no longer believe they can control their destiny, everything falls apart. Over the course of Headshot, girls with a stronger conception of themselves as fighters triumph, and those with a slimmer conception lose the thread in the middle of their fights, essentially giving up.

Bullwinkel’s book is filled with sharp insights into each girl’s philosophy of life, including her relationship to sport and the world beyond sport. She wields this omniscience fluidly, employing such bold techniques as the Muriel Spark–style flash-forward, leaping years into the future to inform the reader what will happen to each girl. This technique allows the reader to see how one brief moment in the characters’ adolescence fits (or in many cases doesn’t fit) with their adult existence. Headshot asks us to look at both a specific instance in a group of lives and the entirety of those lives.

Headshot’s present-day action unfolds in a single boxing gym, whereas its narration roves freely between character, time, and place. Conversely, in Godwin, Joseph O’Neill keeps his perspective tethered to his two main characters while setting his action across the globe. Having achieved previous success with a sports-themed, internationally minded novel, 2008’s Netherland, O’Neill returns to the territory with this story of a technical writer named Mark and his efforts to find Godwin, a teenage Beninese soccer star, on behalf of his sports-agent half brother. Of the book’s five sections, the three shortest are narrated by Lakesha Williams, the cofounder of the technical-writing cooperative to which Mark belongs, whose ideals of collectivism are challenged by threats to her leadership. The two longer sections are recounted by Mark, but one is largely told through the secondhand narration of Jean-Luc Lefebvre, an aging and disagreeable soccer agent who steals Mark’s quest out from under him.

O’Neill imbues his narrative with an ongoing sense of mystery, not only in the three-continent search for the young Godwin but in the more localized machinations that go down at the cooperative, too. The two are not without their correspondences. The book digs deep into the globalized sports economy, examining the ways that Western interests exploit the labor of developing countries for profit but also provide a way out for impoverished kids. “Pure benevolence is not sustainable,” Lakesha concludes at the end of the book. “Mutually beneficial arrangements are the most durable and do the most good.” Godwin is ultimately an exploration of the fitness of this maxim. Mark’s mission, like the mission of the cooperative, is theoretically in service of a “mutually beneficial arrangement,” but it’s also asymmetrical in its balance. This question of moral validation is one Mark struggles with, self-justifying in the face of his wife’s criticisms by asking, “What’s the ethical idea here—that I should leave Godwin alone so that he can enjoy an authentic life of poverty?”

Godwin also digs deep into the global legacy of soccer, with Lefebvre as a mouthpiece for reflections on the game’s glorious and less-than-glorious history. But soccer is only one element in the book’s moral calculus. A wide-ranging inquiry into the ethical demands of the world economy and the viability of the collective ideal, Godwin illustrates another direction for the sports novel—one that takes as a given the international reach of athletics. While earlier novels looked past the arena to comment on the larger systems that influence and reflect the sports world, Godwin expands the reach even further, understanding sport both as a driver of the international marketplace and as a deeply troubling personal question.

Two approaches to the sports novel: the local and the global. But, in fact, Bullwinkel and O’Neill are responding to the same question: How do you make what was traditionally a genre for preteen boys into something that speaks to contemporary adult lives? It’s the central question demanded by the genre and one first asked by Bernard Malamud in 1952, when he published his debut novel, The Natural. Reflecting on that book two decades later, Malamud distilled the essential challenge facing the writer of sports fiction. “Baseball flat is baseball flat,” he told an interviewer.

In order to elevate his book above the ranks of mere schoolboy amusement, he explained, he had to introduce some kind of literary element to “enrich the subject.” Betraying an essential distrust of the narrative power of baseball while also understanding the sport as a locus of countless American myths, Malamud grounded his story of Roy Hobbs’s stunning rise to stardom in whole reams of mythology. Drawing primarily on the legend of King Arthur as well as dipping into other mythological traditions ranging from Greek to Jewish, Malamud presents Hobbs as a fabulous hero come to redeem the woeful New York Knights. His heroics don’t just shift the team’s fortunes; in a strained bit of symbolism, they bring a much-needed rainstorm to the parched fields.

The Natural clearly has more than baseball on its mind, posing tough questions about the nature of heroism in the face of a corrupt society and the possibility of redemption in twentieth-century America. As a sports novel, however, it’s not really a success. Writing in 1968, Alan Warren Friedman criticized the book, arguing that “the baseball formula is too frail to bear the weight of imposed meaning.” In fact, the reverse might be closer to the truth. The problem is not that baseball isn’t sufficiently weighty as a subject; it’s that Malamud doesn’t take baseball seriously enough.

But what was he to do? He was essentially creating a genre. For much of its history, the Western sports novel had been the stuff of inspirational boys’ tales, full of moral instruction and can’t-lose heroes. The prototype in this regard was Frank Merriwell, a fictional Yale student and moral exemplar whose exploits were serialized in Tip Top Weekly from 1896 to 1914, then subsequently published in hundreds of novels. Clean-living and honest, Frank excelled in virtually every sport imaginable. The popularity of the Merriwell books, written by Gilbert Patten under the pen name Burt L. Standish, led to rival series penned by Edward L. Stratemeyer, Zane Grey, and Ralph Henry Barbour, among others. According to Paul Aron, author of The Lineup: Ten Books That Changed Baseball, “What they all had in common was that they were written for boys and to inspire boys; their heroes were very good, athletically and morally. Indeed, they were too good to be believed.”

This changed with the interventions of Ring Lardner, a journalist for the Chicago Tribune, who published a series of humorous first-person stories in The Saturday Evening Post beginning in 1914. These stories were narrated in the semi-literate voice of Jack Keefe, a naive and egotistical young baseball player writing to a friend back in his Indiana hometown. The tales proved immensely popular, combining humor with a new measure of realism and gently deglamorizing the sports story. Although Keefe is ultimately sympathetic, his boastfulness and self-indulgence are anything but heroic, and his path to the big leagues is far from strictly triumphant.

Lardner’s stories were popular and influential, but they were not taken entirely seriously by the literary establishment, with even the author’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald commenting that “however deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had the diameter of [a baseball] diamond.” When Malamud set out to write his baseball novel, his self-imposed task was to extend the diameter, preferably to the outer reaches of civilization. His mythologizing was both an expansion and a deflation of the too-good-to-be-true Frank Merriwell stories, with Roy Hobbs at once larger than life and subject to his own baser impulses. Whatever the merits of Malamud’s book, it proved a watershed moment for the sports novel. As Aron notes, “After The Natural, serious novelists did not hesitate to write about baseball,” with Mark Harris’s more realistic literary novel The Southpaw coming out the next year.

After several years of sputtering, the sports novel emerged fully fledged in the sixties and early seventies, as the sports world quickly came to reflect the country’s larger uprisings. On the one hand, many athletes joined the various protest movements; on the other, numerous commentators viewed the sporting industry as a continuation of the larger corrupt society that surrounded it.

Among the most famous American sports books of the era were a series of nonfiction exposés, like the sarcastic but ultimately amiable Ball Four, pitcher Jim Bouton’s 1970 diary of a season that took readers inside the locker room and exposed management as penny-pinching manipulators. There was also Out of Their League, former football star Dave Meggyesy’s more jaundiced account of his decision to leave the NFL, published the following year. Not surprisingly, novelists quickly followed suit with the arrival of a new brand of rough football novel, which similarly took the reader inside the locker room. Dan Jenkins’s 1972 Semi-Tough and ex-player Peter Gent’s 1973 North Dallas Forty gave readers a fictionalized glimpse at the womanizing, drug use, violence, and, above all, existential fear that characterized life in the country’s top football league.

North Dallas Forty also contains some notable parallels to other novels of the era. Published the same year as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Gent’s novel lacks that book’s scope and ambition, but not its paranoid vision. In North Dallas Forty, narrator Phil Elliot comes to understand himself as a cog in the machine of an increasingly technocratic football world that views him as dispensable and controllable. His worst suspicions are confirmed when he finds out that he has been surveilled over the course of the novel, an investigation leading to his banishment from the league. North Dallas Forty is a suitable companion piece for another football novel, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, published the year before. In that book, the main character, a college football player, becomes obsessed with nuclear warfare, teasing out the connections between the gridiron and the battlefield through the similarities of their vocabularies.

Other sports novelists from the period offered a different take on the relationship between on-field action and the outside world. Notable entries from the era include Leonard Gardner’s 1969 realist boxing novel, Fat City, which frames its story against a vividly sketched down-and-out Stockton, California, and Philip Roth’s irreverently satirical baseball book The Great American Novel, from 1973. Departing from the strict framework of the sports novel is Robert Coover’s 1968 offering, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., in which the titular character becomes consumed by an intricate fantasy baseball world of his own making, with the lines between the real and the imagined blurring until the creator disappears from the narrative entirely.

In Europe, the tradition of sports fiction was established during roughly the same time period, largely through running-themed books like Yves Gibeau’s La Ligne Droite (1956), Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), and Brian Glanville’s The Olympian (1969). As sports theorist Allen Guttmann noted, whereas American novels tended to focus on team sports, the characters in their European counterparts were “much more likely to be runners, cyclists, swimmers, or oarsmen.” If American novels remained concerned with questions of community and team, even if only in the negative, then English and French writers trained their focus on “lonely estranged men, men determined to prove themselves to a hostile world.”

The sixties and early seventies may have represented the first full flowering of the sports novel, but the twenty-first century, and specifically the past decade, have served as an even richer terrain for the literature of athletics. Alongside more traditionally plotted novels like Chad Harbach’s Franzen-esque The Art of Fielding and David Peace’s soccer-themed fictions The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, we’ve seen boundary-expanding works such as Running, French author Jean Echenoz’s highly stylized retelling of the life of Czech runner Emil Zátopek, and Thrown, Kerry Howley’s astonishing work of fictionalized reportage following the careers of two scuffling MMA fighters.

The para-sports novel has been an especially fruitful area of investigation: a micro-genre of books that take place outside official realms of competition but still employ athletics as a frame for their thematic explorations. Among the most significant recent entries in the field are Chris Bachelder’s 2016 novel, The Throwback Special, which uses an annual reenactment of an infamous 1985 football play to offer a comic dissection of middle-aged masculinity, and Anelise Chen’s 2017 collage novel, So Many Olympic Exertions. In the latter book, narrator Athena, a former swimmer and current Ph.D. student studying sports, is struggling to complete her thesis, maintain her funding, and process the recent suicide of an ex-boyfriend. The novel unfolds in a series of short bursts, some only a few sentences long, which combine commentary, description, and quotation, as the narrator draws on her academic sports studies and her personal observations of sport to reflect on different possible directions she might take in her own life.

Chen’s book, in particular, is a telling path forward for the sports novel as well as a fitting companion piece for Bullwinkel’s Headshot. So Many Olympic Exertions is a classic questing novel, enacted on the level of philosophy, and key to Athena’s questing is the issue of motivation. One of the narrator’s special areas of interest is athletes who simply quit, who no longer accept the arbitrary world of the arena and its specialized rules, refusing to go on. As Athena struggles with her own reasons for continuing her studies, her long-ago decision to quit swimming, and her ex-boyfriend’s suicide, the question of motivation in sports and life makes for a rich meditative brew. Similarly composed as a series of fragments, Headshot picks up this theme, capturing the mindset of several boxers who give up mid-bout, their self-conceptions as athletes altered in the moment.

That question of motivation is likely to appear more and more frequently in the contemporary sports novel, as an understanding of the physical and psychological ravages of a sporting career, an increasing focus on mental health, and a generalized sense of global hopelessness lead to a reckoning with the central project of professional sports. Meanwhile, despite these inevitable reconsiderations, the athletic industry continues to grow around the world. We can expect future novels to address the trans-national nature of the sports world, the massive amounts of capital investment flooding the field, and the human cost of all this high-powered maneuvering, as O’Neill does in his latest.

Whether keeping the focus hyperlocal or ranging across the globe, recounting what happens in the ring or leaving the action off the page altogether, the sports novel has proved itself remarkably flexible in recent years. Answering the essential challenge posed by Malamud seven decades ago while taking the world of athletics seriously in a way that The Natural did not, writers like Bullwinkel and O’Neill show that the best sports novels both transcend the genre and are interested in doing no such thing.

Prop styling by Miako Katoh