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QUEST, 1980, 32(2), 209-216 Sports Fiction of the Sixties MELVIN D. PALMER Just as the 1960s was a transitional decade of far-reaching significance in American culture, the 1960s was also a time of major changes in the history of sports fiction. Several of the sports novels of the sixties reflected changes in and were perhaps motivated by socid change in America. During this decade, the dominance of baseball in fiction was broken. Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), for example, initiated a minor interlude of basketball fiction. More importantly, the year 1968 marked a major turning point in sports fiction through novels by Frederick Exley, Robert Coover, and Gary Cartwright. After 1968, writers turned primarily to football in their novels, but baseball stories enjoyed some popularity as a result of the seventies' interest in nostalgia. Just as the 1960s was a transitional decade of far-reaching significance in American culture, the 1960s was also a time of major changes in the history of the sports novel. For example, prior to 1960, baseball not surprisingly domi- nated American sports fiction; in the early seventies, however, football was the dominant metaphor of the sports novel. It has already been well argued that sports change when society changes and that "Sports, in general, are society's way of talking to itself'' (Kelly, 1969, p. 613). Similarly, Smith (1973) has argued that the "sports hero is an ac- curate barometer of the times" (p. 65). It should therefore not surprise anyone that sports fiction in particular, like sports in general, bears a close relation- ship to the cultural events of a particular time. The sports novel of the sixties does in fact seem t o reflect and possibly even About the Author Melvin D. Palmer is with the Department of Comparative Literature at Western Maryland College, Westminster. result from the condition of American society at that time. This study attempts to add a chapter to the history of sports fiction and to the continuing analysis of the turbulent sixties by extending the comments of Kelly and Smith to include sports fiction in particular. In adult fiction, the writers of the six- ties produced only half as many baseball novels as did those of the fifties, and on- ly one of these novels has endured. On the other hand, writers turned out three novels which used basketball as focal metaphors (the first important novels about basketball, in fact) and three novels about football, including one of the earliest adult novels to deal with pro- fessional football.' Before looking at these sports novels of the sixties, however, one must understand the na- 'This study obviously deals with the sports novel intended for adults, not the many sports novels for juveniles. By sports novel is meant a novel that has an athlete for a hero or that has sports as a major theme. This essay deals with mass spectator, team sports. For other types of sports novels, see Palmer (1973).
Transcript

QUEST, 1980, 32(2), 209-216

Sports Fiction of the Sixties

MELVIN D. PALMER

Just as the 1960s was a transitional decade of far-reaching significance in American culture, the 1960s was also a time of major changes in the history of sports fiction. Several of the sports novels of the sixties reflected changes in and were perhaps motivated by socid change in America. During this decade, the dominance of baseball in fiction was broken. Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), for example, initiated a minor interlude of basketball fiction. More importantly, the year 1968 marked a major turning point in sports fiction through novels by Frederick Exley, Robert Coover, and Gary Cartwright. After 1968, writers turned primarily to football in their novels, but baseball stories enjoyed some popularity as a result of the seventies' interest in nostalgia.

Just as the 1960s was a transitional decade of far-reaching significance in American culture, the 1960s was also a time of major changes in the history of the sports novel. For example, prior to 1960, baseball not surprisingly domi- nated American sports fiction; in the early seventies, however, football was the dominant metaphor of the sports novel. It has already been well argued that sports change when society changes and that "Sports, in general, are society's way of talking to itself'' (Kelly, 1969, p. 613). Similarly, Smith (1973) has argued that the "sports hero is an ac- curate barometer of the times" (p. 65). It should therefore not surprise anyone that sports fiction in particular, like sports in general, bears a close relation- ship to the cultural events of a particular time. The sports novel of the sixties does in fact seem to reflect and possibly even

About the Author

Melvin D. Palmer is with the Department of Comparative Literature at Western Maryland College, Westminster.

result from the condition of American society at that time. This study attempts to add a chapter to the history of sports fiction and to the continuing analysis of the turbulent sixties by extending the comments of Kelly and Smith to include sports fiction in particular.

In adult fiction, the writers of the six- ties produced only half as many baseball novels as did those of the fifties, and on- ly one of these novels has endured. On the other hand, writers turned out three novels which used basketball as focal metaphors (the first important novels about basketball, in fact) and three novels about football, including one of the earliest adult novels to deal with pro- fessional football.' Before looking at these sports novels of the sixties, however, one must understand the na-

'This study obviously deals with the sports novel intended for adults, not the many sports novels for juveniles. By sports novel is meant a novel that has an athlete for a hero or that has sports as a major theme. This essay deals with mass spectator, team sports. For other types of sports novels, see Palmer (1973).

210 PALMER

ture of sports fiction prior to and im- mediately after the sixties.

From Ring Lardner's You Know Me, A1 (1916) until Mark Harris's baseball trilogy, completed in 1958, novelists who wrote about sports at all tended to use baseball players as heroes and the baseball diamond as central metaphors.' Lardner moved baseball fiction out of the spring-like innocence of juvenile books and established it as a realistic adult subgenre of the modern novel. His hero, Jack Keefe, was a bush league pit- cher who made the big time and told his own story in letters to his friend Al. In 1923, Heywood Broun's Sun Field presented Tiny Tyler, a Babe Ruth-type slugger. Both pitcher and hitter reflected the ethos of rugged American individu- alism.' Lardner and Broun were follow- ed by writers of the caliber of Nelson Algren (1942), Bernard Malamud (1952), and Mark Harris.

The typical baseball hero was the uneducated but skilled country boy who came to the city only to find it a corrup- ting influence. These country boys had enormous physical appetites. Lardner's Jack Keefe, Malamud's Roy Hobbs, and Harris's Henry Wiggin were all able to put away huge quantities of food, and this hunger symbolized their hunger for money, women, and fame. These practi- tioners of the great American sport were hot in pursuit of the great American dream, which at that time seemed possible.

By stark contrast, the basic metaphor of the sports fiction of the early seven- ties had changed from baseball to foot- ball. Although football had always en- joyed a large popularity in America, sports fiction had all but ignored it,

2For the history of sports fiction see Coffin (1970), Graber (1967), and Palmer (1973).

'For comments on this point, see Graber (1967).

preferring instead the more mythically American game of baseball. During the sixties, however, football for the first time surpassed baseball in gate and television-radio revenue and made tre- mendous gains in attendance f i g ~ r e s . ~ In short, the shift from baseball to football in sports fiction is perhaps related to the similar shift in fact. At any rate, dur- ing 1971 and 1972 four novels about football appeared and none about base- ball.5 Of these four, Whitehead's Joiner (1971) and Dan Jenkins's Semi-Tough (1972) stand out in their presentations of a kind of sports hero quite unlike the earlier baseball counterpart. The new sports heroes were sophisticated city boys whose every physical appetite was easily satisfied, who had no worries about money, and who seemed as little concerned about fame as about money. The great American dream, it appears, had become either impossible or irrele- vant.

The year 1968 climaxed the boiling sixties. It was also the most important year of the decade as far as sports fiction is concerned. Three novels were pub- lished during this year-more than in any other single year of the decade-and all three made significant comments about American culture. Three novels of the sixties-written prior to 1968- which dealt with basketball also con-

4Newspapers often cite statistics on this subject. For example, the Baltimore Sunday Sun ("Big Boom in Sports," 1973) indicated that in comparable figures from 1963 and 1972, football surpassed baseball in gate and TV/Radio revenue. Even though atten- dance figures for baseball big league sports increased from 20.6 million to 27.7, the atten- dance figures for football more than dou- bled, from 7.5 million to 16.

IFor a discussion of the football novel, see Palmer, "Heyday of the Football Novel," in the Journal of Popular Culture (in press).

SPORTS FICTION 21 1

tribute significantly to an analysis of American culture through sports fiction. The other three sports novels of the decade-also written prior to 1968-are primarily potboilers and say virtually nothing about the cultural milieu of the sixties. These last three include Babs Deal's college football story, Grail (1963); Martin Quigley's realistic baseball story, Today's Game (1965); and Irwin Shaw's Voices of a Summer Day (1965). These three novels do not represent major achievements in fiction in general, in sports fiction in particular, nor as barometers of the sixties.

On the other hand, the three basket- ball novels are significant in these respects. Basketball novels constituted an interlude in the transition from the baseball novel to the football novel and included John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960); Jeremy Larner's Delta Prize win- ner, Drive, He Said (1964); and Jay Neugeboren's Big Man (1966).

Although sports are less central to Rabbit, Run than to sports novels in general, it is significant that Rabbit Angstrom is a former basketball player. The kind of running he is impelled to do would have been impossible in the old, more slowly paced baseball world. The speed of the basketball game paralleled the rapid speed-up of change in America during the period. The title of Larner's novel, Drive, He Said, similarly suggests a fast pace. Set on a college campus, the novel explores the world of politics, sex, and drugs in a hectic, frantic way. In a nutshell, this story of two heroes-a star athlete and an intellectual-brings body and mind together in a diatribe against the larger games played by what some people of the sixties called the military- industrial complex. Baseball was too in- appropriate and perhaps too sacred a framework for the world of this novel. The loss of innocence shown in these two novels is also manifest in the other basketball novel of the decade, Neuge-

boren's Big Man (1%6), which grew out of the point-saving scandals of the fif- ties. The novel's hero, Mack Davis (in- cidentally, one of the earliest black heroes of sports fiction), lost a promis- ing career when he gave in to the tempta- tion to shave points. The novel depicts, in the context of his black world, his life after the fall.

These basketball stories, with their speed and excitement, were appropriate for the fast-breaking changes that took place in America in the sixties. In con- trast to basketball, a "perfect" game of baseball is one which has the least ac- tion. Indeed, the more leisurely game of baseball, as it comes across on televi- sion, has been considered less interesting than football in our electronics world. Said a character in The Hundred Yard War,

the one thing baseball's structure could not tolerate was too many eyes, too much close attention. To call attention to yourself in the relaxed atmosphere of the living room was to hammer at the fact that when a viewer left his chair for a drink of water and returned, he had missed nothing. Football, on the other hand, never lacked for action. It takes unusual fortitude for even the most casual fan to change channels; invariably, something will happen to make him hesitate. (Cartwright, 1968, p. 54)

This comment could as easily have been made about baseketball as about foot- ball.

Further, Marshall McLuhan (1966) has observed that because baseball is a

game of one-thing-at-a-time, TV, as the very image of the corporate and partici- pant ways of electric living, fosters habits of unified awareness and social in- terdependence that alienate us from the peculiar style of baseball. (p. 212)

Without suggesting that McLuhan has the last word on sports and the media, one nevertheless finds particular mean-

212 PALMER

ing in his use of the words corporate, electric, un1j7ed awareness, and in- terdependence. Whereas baseball is in general a slow game with low scores, basketball's fast-breaking action tallies up points like a computer. Point infla- tion is the name of the game. Further- more, basketball demands close, "cor- porate" teamwork, "interdependence," and a "unified awareness" in a way that baseball does not quite approximate. Basketball is a game in which patterns have to click off like an "electric" cir- cuit-perfectly and fast-because unlike baseball, the game demands a high degree of efficiency under the tyranny of the clock. In short, if baseball's heroes are the rugged individuals of American sports culture, players who casually stroll to bat or slowly wind up to pitch while others are standing around or sit- ting in the dugout, then the basketball player is a quick and efficient organiza- tion man. In fact, Robert Kelly (1969) has pointed out a contrast between base- ball and football that seems to apply equally as well to baseball and basket- ball:

sports featuring the self-assured, indepen- dent, athlete-performer in a context in which the ... achievement oriented businessman was hailed as the epitome of success, [formerly] enjoyed widespread popularity. The multi-talented baseball player was a model of the successful craftsman. Contemporary life, more fragmented, and more delicately orga- nized, requires new imagery; and foot- ball's increasing popularity is testimony to this process. (p. 613)

Kelly (1969) also commented on the significance of the jargon used in base- ball and football. Whereas baseball's catch words emphasize the individuals- as in the "sultan of swat," "Joltin' Joe," and "Stan the man"-"the language of football is the language of process, not personsw-as in "throwing the bomb," "running the blitz," and

"the doomsday defense" (p. 612). Although Kelly does not say so, he might also have added that some of basketball's catch phrases stress the in- dividual and the team, working together, as in "Alcindor's Army" and "Walton's Gang." It would be unwise to overstate this point, of course, and there are numerous exceptions; never- theless, one may find in the individual- plus-team terminology a transitional jargon and thus one possible reason why basketball novels reflect the larger shift from baseball to football in sports fic- tion.

Basketball was only an interlude, however. It lacked one important ingre- dient. Officially a noncontact sport, basketball lacks the hard-hitting, effi- cient violence that football requires. It is therefore not surprising that the first novel- about professional football ap- peared,' almost symbolically, in 1968, the year the sixties, according to the New York Times Magazine, came to a "full boil" ("60s Come to a Full Boil," 1977, P. 40).

Ushered in by the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the year 1968 was the single most turbulent year in this remarkable decade. Lyndon Johnson decided not to run again. Richard Nixon made his comeback. Eugene McCarthy's star rose and fell. Martin Luther King was assassi- nated. Robert Kennedy was assassi- nated. Students at Columbia threatened to bring academe to a standstill, and the messy Chicago convention taught us just how deep our wounds were. It was the year the Beatles sent Revolution onto the market. Hair came to Broadway, and Simon and Garfunkel asked a very astute question: "Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio?" Indeed, Joltin' Joe had "left and gone away," and with him went, at least for a time, the old baseball world.

Just as 1968 was a big year in fact, so it was in fiction. This was the year the

SPORTS FICTION 213

sports novel came to a full boil. During this year, not only the first novel about professional football appeared-Cart- wright's Hundred Yard War-but Robert Coover also rang the death knell of the old style baseball novel with his Universal Baseball Association; and Frederick Exley, in A Fan's Notes, relegated the sports hero to the past and to the stretcher.

A Fan's Notes (1968) appears to be a thinly disguised autobiography, even though the protagonist-Frederick Ex- ley himself-maintains that his facts cannot be trusted and asks that the book be read as fantasy. His father had been a star football player in high school but had not been able to go to college to fulfill his promise. Instead, he got mar- ried, worked hard, and died at forty. Unlike his father, and in spite of his own good education, Frederick cannnot achieve any kind of success. In this first- person account, he moves about, cannot hold a job, cannot maintain his mar- riage, and even stays for a time in a men- tal hospital. He spends large amounts of time writing, hoping to find in writing the kind of satisfaction he cannot find elsewhere. He also spends a good deal of time at football games and hanging out in bars watching the New York Giants on television. He is therefore a fan, a watcher, and not a participant. Never- theless, football runs throughout the novel like a thread. For Exley, football is "an island of directness in a world of cir- cumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job and he either did it or got out" (p. 8). It provides Exley with what he lacks in his own life: "the wealth and the power that fame would bring.. .love.. .the adulation of the crowd" (p. 35). His Giants hero, Frank Gifford, helps him believe that "fame was possible" (p. 131). Gifford sustains for Exley "the illusion that [he] could escape the bleak anonymity of life" (p. 231).

The novel comes to a climax when Gifford is injured on the football field and taken out of commission for the rest of the season. On the night Gifford is in- jured, Exley's frustration leads him to pick a fight. The fact that Exley and Gif- ford are both 33 years old leads the reader to see that Gifford had become for Frederick the surrogate son of his football-playing father. Now with his father dead and the "true son" out for the season, Frederick is forced from his illusion, if not from his self-pity, to con- clude:

I fought because I understood and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny-unlike that of my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd-to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan. (p. 357)

In spite of the long history of frustra- tion that Exley's novel details, one sees the hero somehow managing to piece together the ragged edges of his life, to make some headway with his writing, and in the last line of the story, to main- tain a kind of heroic posture: "ready to do battle, I am running; obsessively, running" (p. 385).

Exley refers several times to the fact that he does not like to see what America is becoming; without detracting from the achievement of the story, one may say that Frederick himself reflects an America incapable of significant and decisive action, an America where most people sit in the stands and live their lives through others, picking fights occa- sionally in order to exorcise their guilt, sense of failure, or general frustration. It is a disturbing novel which uses the metaphors of sports and violence to treat a time of turmoil and frustration in America.

In the Universal Baseball Association, Robert Coover (1968) pushes the matter one step farther. His protagonist, Henry Waugh, not only is not an athlete, he is

214 PALMER

not even a fan. He is an aging acount- tant who lives alone and makes up games:

He'd always played a lot of games: baseball, basketball, different card games, war and finance games, horserac- ing, football, and so on, all on paper of course. (p. 44)

After trying a variety of these games, he finally "found his way back to baseball.. . .Not the actual game so much-to tell the truth, real baseball bored him-but rather the records, the statistics" (p. 45). In another scene, he tells his only male companion, Lou, that "the real action" of baseball "was over a century ago. It's a bore now" (p. 165).

So Henry makes up an elaborate base- ball game that he plays with complicated charts and three dice. A roll of the dice indicates what happens at bat. He in- vents whole teams-a league, in fact. He invents names for his players and goes through whole seasons. He keeps careful statistics and other records of the league's activities and history. His obses- sion with his own game finally causes him to bring Lou into his confidence, but Lou is horrified at the seriousness with which Henry plays the game. A similar incident causes the hero to lose his only female acquaintance-an old barmaid. He is also fired from his job with an accounting firm because he misses too much work in order to stay home and play his game.

After a tragedy in which his favorite invented player is struck and killed by a wild throw from the pitcher, Henry cheats at dice so that the next batter kills the pitcher with a line drive. At the end of the novel, Henry is entirely in the world of his dreams, living with his in- vented friends, taking them out to a bar to celebrate the good old days. Just as Exley turns more and more inward to his own bruised heart, Henry Waugh, a loner, also turns more and more inward. His game is a form of onanism; in fact,

when Lou spoils his fun, he says he "felt somehow like an adolescent caught mas- turbating" (p. 171). For Waugh, as for Exley, significant action is a thing of the past. Exley shows us a protagonist who is not an athlete, only a fan. Coover's hero is not even that, and in The Univer- sal Baseball Association, the great American dream has become literally a dream. Thus, Coover's novel seems to deliver the coup de grace to the old sports novel as epitomized by baseball. Unlike Exley, however, Waugh has the comfort of acting like a computer by keeping statistics and averages, thereby enabling him to order his world (to the extent of his ability). For Waugh, baseball represents "an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that ac- countability-the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each little action-that had led Henry to baseball" (p. 19). Because the game is his own invention, Henry can avoid the slow pace and offset the low scores of baseball by speeding up the seasons and keeping elaborate records.

In the novel, Coover at times refers to what is happening in the outside world: "The papers spoke blackly of bombs, births, wars, weddings, infiltrations, and social events" (p. 49). Henry glances at the headlines and sees news of "Some priest 'who quit and got married. Gold and silver shortages. Orgy that the cops broke up. Rapes and murders. Makings of another war" (p. 130). He sees the plastic flowers of the outside world and is even offered some by a florist. It is no wonder Henry had long since concluded that a person could take history or leave it, and is content to leave it. He turns in- ward to his game about a game and finds only there, and only to a degree, "some old lost fabric of unity" (p. 166).

In a Harper's review of a nonfictional treatment of sports, Edward Hoagland (1977) recently pointed out that

SPORTS FICTION 215

baseball had stood for loyalty to the verities, memories of innocence, patience with ritual; surely no one who cared about baseball could be an opportunist at heart .... Football [on the other hand] per- sonified the fight of your life .... In the Nixon cabinet, if you knew how the Colts were doing, you were hard nosed, you were all right. (p. 76)

During the riots, demonstrations, and assassinations of the sixties, during the brutality of the war in Vietnam, during these challenges to America's innocence, it seems to be no accident that writers like Coover turned baseball inside out or found football to be a more appropriate metaphor for their fiction than baseball or basketball.

An analogy between football and war has in fact been suggested, and some- times rather bluntly, as here:

Big-time football is an enterprise of in- tended violence; its purpose is to inflict in- jury on opponents .... Football's totaii- tarian structure.. .reflects the militarism prevalent in our culture. The game's ter- minology mirrors the language of war.. . .Training camps are isolated and guarded.. . .Absolute obedience to com- mands is imperative, and nonconformity is totally discouraged .... Just as there was a relationship between the playing fields of Eton and the Battle of Waterloo, there is also a connection between the gridiron and Vietnam. (Bianchi, 1972, pp. 31-32; 34)

Although these comments may be called extreme, there is nevertheless enough truth in them to explain why Cartwright (1968) used the metaphor of war in the title of his novel about professional football-The Hundred Yard War.

A few comments on this novel will clarify the tone and content of the new football novel that Cartwright an- ticipated. In realistic language and detail, the novel traces a season in the careers of two players on the fictional Dallas Troopers team. It begins in a lush

Las Vegas motel with private pool and women swimming in the nude. In this town of sex and money, the Dallas public relations man is lavishing money and women-fame not being very im- portant anymore-on the young draft choice, Regan Glass. The other major figure in the novel is Rylie Silver, a quarterback on the downward path. One sees the whole spectrum of the sport be- tween these two athletes, from pam- pered rookie to a has-been on a waivers list. But more importantly, one sees that the great American dream of the base- ball novel-in large part for money and sex-has been realized in astonishing abundance. The world Cartwright de- picts is a world of easy cash and quick kicks, of physical violence and dehu- manization, and to many people, these must have seemed fitting metaphors for the dislocations in America in 1968.

During the sixties and early seventies, the old Lardner and Harris country-boy- hero-in-quest-of-a-dream gave way not only to the ineffectual fanishness of Ex- ley's hero and the psychic dislocations of Coover's hero, but also to the frank hedonism of Cartwright's new football hero. Indeed, the term hero hardly seems appropriate. Even when baseball reappeared in fiction in 1973, a return to the old mythic baseball hero did not oc- cur. Instead, the baseball hero was debunked by Philip Roth's (1973) Great American Novel, which lambasted baseball and all the character types associated with it. His narrator sees Babe Ruth as a clownish glutton moti- vated by egomania. In keeping with the vogue for nostalgia in the early seven- ties, two novels were more nostalgic than Roth's, but nostalgia itself implies something dreamily past and ir- retrievable. William Brasher's The Bingo Long Traveling All-stars and Motor Kings (1973) looked back to the good old days, specifically to black baseball in the thirties. The title of John

216 PALMER

Graham's (1973) novel, on the other hand, is perhaps more significant in establishing a point of view for the time: Babe Ruth Caught in a Snow Storm. The title refers to the old-fashioned, cheap, globular, glass-enclosed knick- knack in which snow falls when it is in- verted. A character in the novel owns one of these knickknacks, and inside, the Babe is frozen as he is ready to swing. The Babe and his world have become encased in the blurred world of nostalgia.

Impotence, cynicism, hedonism, nostatgia-these diverse words characterize the sports novels (and their heroes, or anti-heroes) by writers from 1968 on into the early seventies. If Kelly (1969) and Smith (1973) are correct in respectively calling sports "society's way of talking to itself" (p. 613) and a "barometer of the times" (p. 65), then the same is true of sports novels pub- lished during the dislocating sixties in America.

REFERENCES

Algren, N. Never come morning. New York: Harper, 1942.

Bianchi, E. Pigskin piety. Christianity in Crisis, February 21, 1972, pp. 31-32; 34.

Big boom in sports. Baltimore Sunday Sun, April 15, 1973, p. D-1.

Brasher, W. The Bingo Long traveling all- stars and motor kings. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Broun, H. Thesun field. New York: Putnam, 1923.

Cartwright, G. The hundred yard war. New York: Doubleday, 1968.

Coffin, T.P. The old ball game: Baseball in folklore and fiction. New York: Herder & Herder, 1970.

Coover, R. The universal baseball associa-

tion. New York: Random House, 1968. Deal, B. Grail. New York: McKay, 1963. Exley, F. A fan's notes. New York: Harper &

Row, 1968. Graber, R.S. Baseball in American fiction.

English Journal, 1967, 56, 1107-1110. Graham, J. Babe Ruth caught in a snow

storm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Harris, M. The southpaw. Indianapolis:

Bobbs-Merrill, 1953. Harris, M. Bang the drum slowly. New York:

Knopf, 1956. Harris, M. A ticket for seamstitch. New

York: Knopf, 1958. Hoagland, E. Review. Harper's, July 1977,

p. 76. Jenkins, D. Semi-tough. New York:

Athenaeum, 1972. Kelly, R.J. Toward a theory of competition

and cooperation in sports as an indicator of change in American life. Journal of Popular Culture, 1969, 2, 604-614.

Lardner, R. You know me, AI. New York: Scribner's, 1916.

Larner, J. Drive, he said. New York: Delta, 1964.

McLuhan, M. Understanding media. New York: Delta, 1966.

Malamud, B. The natural. New York: Har- court, Brace, 1952.

Neugeboren, J. Big Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Palmer, M.D. The sports novel: Mythic heroes and natural men. Quest, 1973, 19, 49-58.

Quigley, M. Today's game. New York: Vik- ing, 1965.

Roth, P. The great American novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1973.

Shaw, I. Voices of a summer day. New York: Delacorte Press, 1965.

Smith, G. The sports hero: An endangered species. Quest, 1973, 19, 59-70.

The 60's come to a full boil. New York Times Magazine, November 13, 1977, p. 40.

Updike, J. Rabbit, run. Greenwich, CN: Fawcett, 1960.

Whitehead, J. Joiner. New York: Knopf, 1971.


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