Why am I passionate about this?
For 20 years, I tried to write politically relevant, “important” novels. I teach. One day I told my students that to succeed as a writer, they needed to write about things they knew and loved. Honesty was the key. That night, I resumed work on a novel set in Prague involving Cold War intrigue, capitalism, communism, and some other "isms" I’ve forgotten. I wrote a paragraph and then stopped. My advice was good. Write about things you know and love. So why not follow it myself? What section of the newspaper did I read first? The sports page. Did I live and die with my favorite sports teams? Yes. I put my hopeless Prague novel aside and started On the Devil’s Court. For better or worse, a sportswriter is who I am.
Carl's book list on sports books about more than sports
Why did Carl love this book?
Okay, two books--but they’re really one. The Southpaw is
about Henry
Wiggen the baseball player finding his way in the major leagues. A sports book by and large. And then the fastball to the heart--Bang the Drum
Slowly. The vagaries and tragedies of life intrude on the pristine
baseball field, and Wiggen and the rest have to deal with reality: boys
grow into men; men sicken, men die. These books inspired me when I
decided to become a writer of sports novels. They showed me that not only
could I write a sports book about more than sports, but also that I needed to write
a sports book about more than sports. Why bother otherwise?
1 author picked Bang the Drum Slowly as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer. Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other…