When it comes to excitement and drama, there is not much better for many people than live sports. There is so much passion – in the stands and on the field or court – that it can offer fans the most memorable evenings of their lives. The natural drama is almost innate in sports and creates moments that will be talked about for years.
So, why is it that there are not many good sports novels?
What’s Up With the Sports Genre?
It is not as though there is not enough sports “content” in the world. Game reports to online blogs to all the new Indiana sportsbooks – there is a never-ending supply of people writing about all aspects of sports. But rarely do we get to enjoy novels about one of the most popular elements of modern society.
That is not to say that there are no good books about sports. Take a quick glance at any best-sellers list, and you will notice a wide variety of biographies and autobiographies about sports athletes – as well as non-fiction books about big sports events and games. Even books about sports teams you have never heard of tend to be of the non-fiction variety. The legendary Friday Night Lights is an excellent example of this.
Sports can be used as a metaphor for the human condition, as the protagonists play through a season, enjoying and enduring the highs and lows to finish up in victory or defeat. We can read about the results of a team over a period of time and translate them to our own experience. But, for some reason, it is nearly always using an actual player or team rather than a piece of fiction. Could it be that sports fans would rather read about actual teams, and non-sports fans don’t want to read about sports at all?
That last point is sometimes put forward as a reason for the relative lack of good sports novels. But people like reading about subjects they know nothing about all the time. Why would sports be any different? If an author can build a fictional world for the reader to become immersed in, he or she should also be able to write about sports in a way that excites readers who don’t even like sports in real life.
Maybe sports don’t work as well in fiction as the stories become cliché. It is the very nature of sports that there will always be winners and losers. It is also true that it is not always the plucky underdogs that end up on the winning side. Hollywood movies may convey the idea that the ragtag bunch of misfits can beat the highly skilled and wealthy professionals. But that just isn’t the case most of the time in real sports. Writing realistically about sports does not commonly offer the ability to escape the cliché of the better teams winning.
Reality and Fiction – Where’s the Connection?
Don DeLillo routinely wrote about sports, especially baseball, in his novels, but it tended to be used as something to move the plot along rather than the main subject itself. Could it be that we are more interested in sports in literature when they are used in this way, as plot devices and as a substitute for commenting on the culture of society? We enjoy watching the story of a real team’s struggles for glory but can only relate to the use of sports in a novel when the author is really talking about something else.
Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch might be thought of as a novel by some (especially if they are more aware of the movie of the same name). But this, again, is a piece of non-fiction. The book is an autobiography that uses Hornby’s immersion into the world of soccer after his parents’ divorce as the plot and how his later life became defined by the results of his favorite team rather than the birthdays and anniversaries of his loved ones. Even when a story seems more like a novel – and is written in such a captivating way – the great sports books still turn out to be based on real life, at the very least.
The idea of nostalgia is never far away when it comes to sports books but we do still want to know the facts and figures of real life, rather than discover a fictionalized version of this world. We seem not to be prepared to learn about an imaginary world when reading about sports. It may be one of the most naturally dramatic pastimes known to humankind – but sports novels just don’t work for us on the whole.
