Angie Abdou

Introduction

Over the past decade, sport literature courses have sprung up at colleges and universities across the continent, in both English and kinesiology departments. As the author of a sport novel, The Bone Cage (2007), I have been invited to speak to students in Newfoundland, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia, as well as in Maine, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Colorado, Texas, and Kansas. Because I am enthusiastic about sport literature, professors in the discipline frequently contact me with questions. Mostly, they want me to recommend secondary sources. They want strong academic essays to assign to their students, as examples of the critical analysis of sport literature. Unfortunately, there are still relatively few such essays available.

In Canada, an exciting body of critical writing specifically about hockey has emerged, beginning with Richard Gruneau and David Whitson’s Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics (1993). Since Gruneau and Whitson’s groundbreaking study, several collections of essays have appeared, including Whitson and Gruneau’s follow-up work, Artificial Ice: Hockey, Culture, and Commerce (2006); Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity, edited by Andrew Holman (2009); and Now Is the Winter: Thinking About Hockey, edited by Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison (2009). In addition, two full-length studies—Jason Blake’s Canadian Hockey Literature (2010) and Michael J. Buma’s Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels (2012)—have offered critical surveys of hockey fiction in Canada. But these scholars have, for the most part, adopted an interdisciplinary approach, rather than offering close readings of the hockey novels and poems that tend to be taught in sport literature courses.

Perhaps the critical and commercial popularity of certain hockey novels—classics like Roy MacGregor’s The Last Season (1983), Paul Quarrington’s King Leary (1987), and Bill Gaston’s The Good Body (2000)—has helped to overcome some of the historical prejudice in the academy against the study of sports and, by extension, against literature about sports. At the same time, works of literature about sports other than hockey have largely been ignored. The present collection aims to redress this imbalance, by including considerations of some of the best recent literature in Canada about other sports. In preparing the collection, we intended to maintain an even balance between hockey and “not-hockey” literature, but continually found our hockey list outweighing all other sports combined. The same thing happens each time I teach a sport lit course: if I don’t stay vigilant, I easily end up teaching a hockey lit course. This phenomenon is easy to explain: there is an abundance of very good Canadian literature about hockey—which is, after all, an iconic sport in this country, intricately entwined with efforts to summon a pan-Canadian sense of identity. To make room for non-hockey sport literature, we have thus left out some classic Canadian hockey literature: Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater (1979), Jamie Fitzpatrick’s You Could Believe in Nothing (2011), Steven Galloway’s Finnie Walsh (2000), Mark Anthony Jarman’s Salvage King, Ya! (1997), and Cara Hedley’s Twenty Miles (2007).

The growing interest in hockey for Canadian writers and scholars also led to a growth in hockey conferences, the first of which was hosted by Colin Howell at St. Mary’s University, in Halifax, in October 2001. According to the proceedings, the conference “Putting It on Ice: Hockey in Historical and Contemporary Perspective” was “meant to be the first in a series of conferences on hockey and its historical and social significance” (Howell 2002, vol.1). This conference helped to jump-start an increase in scholarly analysis of hockey and set the pattern for future conferences, which have brought together scholars, journalists, members of community hockey organizations, athletes, and writers and poets from across North America and Europe. In 2002, Howell organized a follow-up conference on women’s hockey, and two years later, Andrew Holman, a professor of Canadian studies at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, organized a conference called “Canada’s Game: Hockey and Identity.” Since then, hockey conferences have been held every two or three years. The hockey essays in Writing the Body in Motion offer explanations for this wealth of hockey literature and the growing scholarly interest in it, while also examining the association between hockey and Canadian identity.

We hope the interest in hockey literature will gradually extend to other types of sport literature. Sport lit courses allow students the opportunity to critique sport culture and to analyze the role of athletics in today’s society. Most of us, at some point in our lives, participate in sport, and many of us also interact with sport as consumers by attending or watching sporting events or following sports in the media. Sport literature courses give us a chance to think critically about that consumption. We intend this collection to complement those courses, both for professors as lecture material and for students as models of literary criticism and as research sources. The essays offer a variety of ways to read, teach, and write about sport literature. Organized chronologically by source text, from Shoeless Joe (1982) to Indian Horse (2012), the essays in this collection focus specifically on contemporary Canadian sport literature.

The lessons of these literary works—and the essays about them—extend beyond the sporting arena. According to the course website of Don Morrow, who taught one of Canada’s first sport lit courses at the University of Western Ontario, sport literature is never just about sport; rather, it explores the human condition using sport as the dominant metaphor. Similarly, Priscila Uppal, perhaps the most well-known Canadian scholar and writer to focus her attention on this topic, explains that the best sport literature functions as “metaphor, paradigm, a way to experience some of the harsher realities of the world, a place to escape to, an arena from which endless lessons can be learned, passed on, learned again” (2009, xiv). Many of the essays in this collection, therefore, examine the various ways in which sport functions metaphorically. Our authors also consider various recurring themes of sport literature, including how sport relates to the body, violence, gender, society, sexuality, heroism, the father/son relationship, memory, the environment, redemption, mortality, religion, quest, and place.

Two theorists feature prominently in the following essays: Joseph Campbell and Michael Oriard. Because writers often represent sport stories as a quest for victory, with the athlete as mythic hero, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) works well as a contextual and theoretical framework. Campbell proposes the “monomyth” of the hero’s journey, which involves a departure from home, overcoming obstacles, triumph, and a return to community with new knowledge (see Campbell 2008). Scholars in this collection study how authors choose to digress from this structure and how the victory that the athletes achieve (self-knowledge) often differs from the one they sought (gold medal). Several of the essays draw on Campbell’s notions of rebirth to analyze how these athletes return home with new knowledge and must learn to reintegrate into their (sport) society, as well as how the reborn athletes might change that society on their return. Michael Oriard also offers great insight into myths of the athlete-hero, particularly in his book Dreaming of Heroes: American Sport Fiction (1982). Oriard builds upon the work of Campbell and applies Campbell’s theories specifically to sport, making Oriard’s work especially relevant to teachers and students of sport literature. A professional football player turned academic, Oriard has made important contributions to the field and is widely recognized as one of the foremost cultural historians of American football. His ideas, though, can be extended beyond football. In the following essays, scholars apply his theories to hockey, swimming, wrestling, and baseball. Though published in 1982, Dreaming of Heroes is still relevant and remains critical reading for any student of sport literature.

In the discussion of Alexander MacLeod’s “Miracle Mile,” Laura Davis asserts that MacLeod’s story is not your typical sport literature. “Miracle Mile,” Davis argues, is “far from a narrative about victory.” The same can be said of all the works examined in this collection. For example, Cara Hedley’s analysis of King Leary reveals that the protagonist was only ever a king in his own mind and that Quarrington’s novel works to deconstruct the very notion of sport-hero. Through that deconstruction, Hedley—via Quarrington—also questions the role of hockey in the construction of our nation’s identity. Sport lit courses tend to focus on stories that work against the traditional sport-hero narrative. We all know the typical narrative arc from classic sport movies like Rocky, Hoosiers, The Mighty Ducks, and countless others. The movie starts with an underdog who decides to go for it. He (yes, it is almost always a he) trains and trains and trains. He experiences some victory, and the audience becomes deeply invested in his success. But then he experiences an obstacle—maybe he is injured; maybe his dad dies; maybe his girlfriend dumps him. He appears to give up, to quit. Cue the dark, moody music. Zoom in on the hero, sitting on the kitchen floor, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled low over his forehead, his face in shadow. But don’t despair! Along comes the coach to give him a rallying pep talk—or a well-placed kick in the butt, followed by an almost affectionate pat on the shoulder, depending on the characterization of the coach—and our hero “digs deep.” He decides to “give it all he’s got!”—to “go for it!” Of course, sport rewards his efforts. He wins, and we end with our hero on the podium, arms raised high.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a sucker for these movies. I cry every single time. Even in Men with Brooms (2002), a comedy about a group of beer-guzzling curlers, when they went for it, I cried. Right at that point when the coach finishes his rallying pep talk, with the hero nodding intently, his gaze fierce, my husband always turns to me: “Oh, Ang! He’s going to go for it!” My husband mocks me—he laughs at my guaranteed overly emotional reaction to the hero’s predictable move towards victory—but let it be known that we both have tears rolling down our cheeks. He and I met on a varsity swim team. We went for it, and we have the arthritic shoulders as proof. Neither of our careers ended on the podium. We both get a little weepy at these perfect sport stories. I suppose we like the comforting predictability, as well as the tidy way in which effort and “playing with heart” are always rewarded. The movies offer a kind of simplistic reassurance: by winning in the end, the hero (and the audience) can make sense of everything that has come before—the suffering, the injustice, the confusion, the sacrifice. A victory makes it all right.

Despite the emotional satisfaction that I take in these predictable stories, I have always known that they have very little connection to the truth of athletic lives. I wrote my swimming-wrestling novel, The Bone Cage (2007), partly as a response to the discrepancy I saw between sport movies and sport lives. I wanted to write a sport novel that did not end on the podium. I wanted to ask if the Olympic quest might be a misguided quest. Gyllian Phillips takes up that issue in her essay on The Bone Cage, explicating the book’s literary allusions and drawing parallels with the quest-gone-wrong in Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” In fact, the quest motif appears in many of the essays in this book. Fred Mason, for example, employs the work of Joseph Campbell in his discussion of quest in Shoeless Joe, and Jamie Dopp points out that the marathon swimmer in Samantha Warwick’s Sage Island might, in the end, have undertaken a very different quest than the one she intended. We find a comparison between hockey and Zen Buddhism in Bill Gaston’s The Good Body, where engagement in sport helps the protagonist on his journey towards a kind of enlightenment. In each case, sport is a microcosm of our wider society, and the problematization of a certain kind of sport-quest can become a problematization of all quests, an evaluation of all strategies to ascribe meaning and shape to life.

Not only do the texts we have chosen for this volume disrupt the traditional underdog-to-podium sport narrative, but they also tend to undermine the very notion of athletic success. Though the characters often come to sport looking for redemption, the redemption they find has little to do with gold medals. In Samantha Warwick’s marathon swimming novel Sage Island, when Savanna Mason arrives at the Wrigley Ocean Marathon, she thinks: “I wonder if everyone who came here for this race feels like a loser. I wonder if this whole event is fueled by failures wanting to redeem themselves” (Warwick 2008, 52). Initially, Savanna feel like a “loser” who needs to prove herself with this race. In the conclusion, though, this personal affirmation does not take the form readers might expect. Instead, Sage Island, like much of the literature discussed in this collection, redefines the very concepts of “winner” and “loser” and the notions of “success” and “failure.”

Again, this evaluation of the notion of success can be applied beyond sport. In the introduction to her sport literature anthology, Priscila Uppal compares the work of a writer to that of an athlete, claiming that both artists and athletes “pursue excellence through discipline and rigour, both sacrifice other pleasures in this pursuit, and both are actively engaged in . . . ‘pain management’ (the ability to turn pain into a creative, dynamic force)” (2009, xi–xii). Uppal adds that “truly great practitioners in both arenas are possessed with the curious ability to actively change the rules the game are played by” because they are “originals rather than followers” (xii). Similarly, both Shoeless Joe and Sage Island compare novel writing and athletic competition. In Shoeless Joe, Kinsella compares the writing vocation (manifested in J. D. Salinger) to life as a professional baseball player. In Sage Island, Savanna’s brother dreams of publishing a novel, and his creative pursuit is compared to Savanna’s athletic pursuits. Savanna’s coach (Higgins) feels badly for the parents of these two individuals (the novelist and the athlete) with their non-mainstream dreams. He says, “I was just thinking of your parents, such practical creatures, and both kids turn out dreamers, desperadoes” (Warwick 2008, 81). Here, Warwick portrays sport (like novel-writing) as a kind of rebellion, a rejection of mainstream values and scripts. Savanna’s father disapproves of her involvement in swimming, claiming, “Swimming is not a vocation, Savanna, it’s a diversion” (96). Savanna, nonetheless, pursues her swimming goals and, because the narrative is in the first person, readers tend to identify with her and wish her success in her endeavours rather than hope that she will give up on her athletic dreams and fulfill her adult responsibilities in her parents’ bakery. In this way, the novel presents swimming, and athletics in general, as a way of rejecting society’s predetermined script—grow up, finish school, get a job, start a family. Instead, the novel favourably represents the alternative of following individual dreams that may not always seem logical or practical, dreams that individuals might not always be able to justify easily to their parents. Readers are asked to consider whether these athletes, these “dreamers and desperadoes,” truly escape from adult responsibilities and obligations: Do they simply delay their inevitable entry into mainstream society? Or do they create new ways of being and thereby redefine what constitutes “success”? Again, sport functions as a vehicle through which to question and critique wider societal values and ways of being in the world.

Perhaps Warwick’s devotion to swimming as a lifestyle comes from her own participation in the sport. She still swims competitively and coaches the sport. The same is true of many authors under consideration in this collection. Richard Wagamese played hockey. Randall Maggs played goalie and watched his brother compete in the NHL. Alexander MacLeod ran at an elite level. When I set out to write The Bone Cage, I considered using a sport other than swimming, solely because I did not want readers to make autobiographical assumptions based on my own history in the sport. However, I soon realized that no amount of book research could replace those decades in the pool. No matter how much I read about other sports or interviewed other athletes, I would never obtain the visceral knowledge that I have of swimming, a sport I know in my very body. The other athlete-writers represented in this collection bring the same bodily expertise to their exploration of sport, and I invite student-athletes to do the same in their writing.

Because the sport literature analyzed in this collection engages not only in representation of sport for its own sake but also in a rigorous, philosophical examination of everyday life and values, the works lend themselves to various political and theoretical approaches. Trevor Phillips and Sam McKegney, for example, provide an important postcolonial analysis of Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse, with its portrayal of the brutal residential school system and the implication of hockey in the violence and abuse. If hockey symbolizes Canada better than the flag, then where is the place for Indigenous peoples and what is the relationship between hockey and the First Nations? McKegney and Phillips explore this question in their analysis of Wagamese’s Indian Horse.

Turning the political gaze to the environment, Cory Willard offers a consideration of Thomas Wharton’s Icefields and explores how we can use this mountaineering novel to think about conservation and climate change. His analysis of the novel urges political activism to protect our planet. Rather than being an escape from politics and from pressing contemporary issues, sport lit can offer an arena for vigorous political engagement and activism. To use the words of Jason Blake in his exploration of play in Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans, hockey and hockey literature “are more than escapist flight from real life” and can, instead, be a place where players (and readers) make sense of their world.

The texts chosen for this collection work to deconstruct the mind/body dichotomy. Each of our essayists makes clear the many ways in which athletic literature can be of great intellectual interest. Of course, there are many more works of fiction we could have included, like Canada’s postmodern hockey novel Salvage Kings, Ya! (1997) by Mark Anthony Jarman, or the wheelchair basketball novel Post (2007), by Arley McNeney, or the mountaineering novel Every Lost Country (2010), by Steven Heighton, or the swimming novel Flip Turn (2012), by Paula Eisenstein. In fact, sport also plays a major role in many key canonical Canadian literature texts. Think, for example, of the swimmers in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000), Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel (1954), and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972). This collection focuses on the texts currently taught most often in sport literature courses, and we hope our book will move the conversation forward.

WORKS CITED

Howell, Colin D. 2002. “Hockey’s Many Meanings and Contested Identities.” Introduction to Putting It on Ice: Hockey and Cultural Identities, vol. 1 of Putting It on Ice, edited by Colin D. Howell, v–vii. Halifax: Gorsebrook Research Institute, Saint Mary’s University.

Uppal, Priscila, ed. 2009. The Exile Book of Canadian Sport Stories. Toronto: Exile Editions.

Warwick, Samantha. 2008. Sage Island. Victoria: Brindle and Glass.