Books: Jock Lit 101

SPORTS IN AMERICA

by JAMES A.MICHENER

466 pages. Random House. $12.50.

THE JOY OF SPORTS

by MICHAEL NOVAK

357 pages. Basic Books. $10.95.

These days, it seems, sports are too important to be left to sportswriters. The bestselling novelist and the professor of philosophy under consideration here are only the latest literati to suit up and trot onto the playing field, drop-kicking references to Homer, Hemingway and John “Rabbit” Updike as they go.

And what does the sports shelf have to gain besides a higher class of allusion from this new breed of Jock Lit? Well, length for one thing−notably in the case of James Michener. As readers of tomes like Hawaii and Centennial can testify, Michener is not one to take his obligations lightly, and the way he tells it. he owes a lot to sports. As a closet jock−and most Jock Lit starts with confession−Michener testifies that basketball rescued him from a career of crime as a tough kid in Doylestown, Pa. At 69, tennis is his game. Since 1965, when he suffered a coronary infarction, he has credited sports with saving his life. By Michener standards, this calls for a nearly 500-page thank-you note.

Sports in America is less a well-shaped and readable book than a random walk on the subject by an author who may be thought of as the writing man’s jogger. Besides frequent patches of straight autobiography, there are countless obligatory examples of the disguised autobiography known as the nostalgia-trivia game, including a play-byplay account of how Howard Ehmke almost (but not quite) pitched a no-hit game for the Red Sox on May 28, 1924. A fan as in fanatic, Michener further demonstrates the dread total recall of Jock Lit in reporting his meetings with everybody from Montreal Canadiens Goalie Ken Dryden to Fleurette Rigby, a four-year-old minicar racer.

The Jock Lit man of letters must also let his reader know he is not just a sportswriter. Sooner or later he will bring the smell of the library to the bleachers, as well as vice versa. To introduce a tone of scholarship−take that, Red Smith!−Michener compulsively piles up statistics on matters ranging from the death rate of ex-athletes (they live a couple of years less than the rest of us) to the win-loss records of Big Ten football teams and the average salaries in professional sports (as of 1974, basketball led with $90,000 per star, followed by hockey at $75,000).

Still, it is by his social theories that the new Jock Lit author tries finally to establish authority. The rambling nature of Michener’s essay−chapter headings range from “The Media” to “Government Control”−allows him plenty of room for obiter dicta. They are all too predictable. Solemnly he warns against “the jungle of juvenile sports competition.” As if it were a late bulletin, he announces that professional sports have become too violent (“I am worried about ice hockey”). He also worries about women athletes’ vulnerability to foot injury, but he is, of course, for women in sports−and everywhere else, he claims, citing his portraits of Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, Elly Zahm in Centennial.

If Michener is the evangelist of sports−Jock Lit’s Billy Graham−Novak is the theologian. “Sports is. somehow, a religion,” Novak declares, and happily settles down to his priestly duties. Words like “ritual,” “legend” and “myth” labor in overtime. “Grace” takes on a double meaning. Old George Blanda is compared to Ulysses as he copes on “the green oval floor of the amphitheater” otherwise known as a football field. The “unforgettable stance and fluid swing” of Joe DiMaggio cannot be celebrated without cosmic theorizing. “Baseball is as close a liturgical enactment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant myth as the nation has,” Novak writes. “It is to games what the Federalist Papers are to books.”

There is more Proustian remembrance to come, mostly in what may be described as sandlots-revisited prose: “It is difficult to express the sheer beauty I experienced facing leftward, feeling the blazing sun upon my head, feeling the weedy field fly beneath my feet . . . looking back and spotting it, falling out of the silvery blue sky, glinting in the sun, the burning pointed oval that my out stretched fingers so desired.”

Killing the Fun. It is as if violence in sports has found a parallel in the violation of style by a Jock Lit author like Novak, who has written with consider able grace and intelligence on the equally treacherous subject of American politics (Choosing Our King). For sports’ new and embarrassing lovers are not so much wrong as excessive. The shrill use of “joy” and “fun” and “pleasure” in the titles and texts comes to sound as suspect as “honest” in the name of a used-car dealer. Jock Lit authors are so deadly serious they kill the fun. Yet they are not serious enough. To suggest, as Novak does, that sports may lie at the heart of America’s spiritual regeneration is to overrate sports−or underrate religion−or both.

Such claims aside, a marginal case can be made for Jock Lit. Taken as innocent ego trips by authors who want to retain title to a Huck Finn boyhood without forfeiting their college degrees, the genre may be enjoyed by nostalgic and overeducated readers on their own night off. Furthermore, the premise behind these books is admirable: Why should the jock and the egghead be cultural schizophrenics? Alas, the question remains unanswered by those who now raise it. As ex-Puritans, Michener, Novak and their literary teammates are simply trying too hard to get body and soul together.