Could Bo Have Known It’d Be Like This?

by Weston Cutter

I liked Michael Weinreb‘s Game of Kings enough—liked it plenty to finish it fast, and to push it on a friend or two. That book—a story of a high school chess team from NY—was enjoyable, an easy and quick read, etc. What that book did not at all prepare me for was this, Weinreb’s Bigger Than the Game, which is one of the smartest, fastest, best sports books I’ve read in some time. Bigger/Game announces Weinreb’s entry into the ranks of Must-Read writers, regardless of what subject he’s covering—and, better, Bigger/Game shows that Weinreb can write about anything.

Meaning what? Meaning here’s your subtitle: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the 80′s Created the Modern Athlete. If you’re at all like me, you’re buying the book the second you see the picture of Bo Jackson (true: the first bio I ever read was Bo Knows Bo, and all I retain from it is the story of him spotting, through windows, some adult couple getting intimate)(I read it when I was 14). However, even if you’re not inspired to read by a picture of one of the best athletes of the last half-century, what you find soon is that the last bit of the subtitle, How the 80′s Changed the Modern Athlete, is where Weinreb’s gonna be spending the bulk of his time. For instance, here’s the start of “We’re Not Here to Start Trouble,” chapter 4:

Something was happening in Chicago that fall, something weird and dynamic and compelling, the origins of which could be traced back to the Thursday night in Minnesota when a woozy and petulant Jim McMahon nagged his way into a football game. It wasn’t just that the Bears were winning week after week after week (though, considering their fans had endured two decades of routine futility, that was strange enough). It was that the bears were winning with such naked audacity; it was that they actually appeared to be reveling in their own very public dysfunction. In the same city where a morning-show host named Oprah Winfrey was in the process of refashioning the tabloid talk show into a syndicated group-therapy session, the Bears were quickly becoming an affirmation of the new American ideal: a motley group of individualists who embraced capitalism and celebrity, who embodied nothing so much as immoderation and self-regard.

What’s cool about Weinreb’s fantastic Bigger Than the Game is the same thing that’s cool about the best sports writing (I’m looking at you, Mahler): he’s got a philosophic framework he’s fitting this stuff into, and so the sports under examination and discussion suddenly are larger by being contextualized. Like most of my peers, I, early on, bought into the notion that I absolutely needed to possess pairs of Air Jordans, and then, later, I realized the heat of that fervor was misplaced, was the result mainly of awe at Jordan and perfect work by Nike and the various ad agencies it worked with. What I didn’t consider, not once until Weinreb pointed it out, was that the mid-80′s allowed a terrifically strange cultural moment for folks like Jordan (and Bo, and Boz, and whoever Len Bias could’ve been) to take the stage.

And what was the cultural moment? Weinreb’s got suggestions, namely Reagan and Stallone movies. Before you balk at the notion, consider it for just a second more: Reagan was, yes, old enough to be a fossil, yet he was always canny, and he—Mr. Morning in America, the Gipper—led America with his image as much as anything else. And his image was, of course, old Hollywood, the rugged individual, that western ideal of self-sufficiency and -reliance. Rambo and Rocky were, of course, cut from much the same cloth. Nothing’s inherently wrong with this individualistic framework, but Weinreb points out how things got strange because of it: rugged, radical individualism came to be considered a legitimate form of citizenship. Think, for a second, of Rocky, fighting the Russian (Dolph Lundgren may as well be nameless, he’s just the Russian, but, of course, Stallone wrote the screenplay: dude’s name’s Ivan Drago) in Rocky IV, and the movie’s end, him wreathed in bruises and blood, wrapped in the flag, doing the whole thing for his country.

It’s hard to do this level of philosophic work justice, this stuff Weinreb does. His point is that, in the 80′s (mid-80′s, specifically: 85/85), there was a sudden twining of notions of wild inviduality(/-ism) and patriotism. Think otherwise? Think Joe Namath: he was a celebrity QB, and his style certainly gave rise to McMahon and the rest, later, but Namath wasn’t co-opted, instantly, by brands or a country’s hunger for authentic heroes. And don’t think that means nothing, the country’s hunger: ’85 was the middle of Iran/Contra stuff, was a decade after Watergate, Greed is Good and 9 years into what T. Wolfe called the Me Generation: Bo Jackson, Brian Bosworth, Michael Jordan, Jim McMahon—these men took the positions in culture they did because we needed them there, we need sports stars who, through self-interest, served everyone. It’s a scary but not serious stretch to think of this stuff in pretty Ayn Rand-ian terms.

There’s much, much more to this fascinating, absolutely devourable book: there’s lots about Len Bias who Weinreb slots in almost as a cipher, as an un-puzzlable clue. In fact, Weinreb almost uses Bias as the perfect example of the rise he’s tracking: Bias was quiet, dedicated, worked his ass off publicly, never drank or smoked or did anything around his teammates and coaches…yet had, according to several folks, another side, a coke-sniffing side. He never got the chance to—like McMahon, like Bo Jackson, like Jordan—be fully Himself (in order: cans of beers clutched on exit from limos; breaking bats over knees and playing whatever the hell sport he wanted; ushering in a whole new wave and level of branding in the NBA) publicly (of who he Himself most was was a drug-user). Bigger Than the Game is a riveting read, and one of the best books—not sports books, not nostalgia books, just books, period—of the fall. Get in on the Weinreb wagon early.

British Days and Baseball

by Weston Cutter

One Day by David Nicholls

It’s funny—this book seemed poised to be brutally hyped, all set to be that annoying summer book that nobody’ll shut up about. Maybe it is, I don’t know (I live rural, far from book-chatter), but I’m actually sort of surprised and glad if the book didn’t get shaped hard into the summer’s Big Book (though give it time, I suppose–the thing’s already being turned into a movie, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess).

Let’s be real fair, from the start: One Day is almost 100% made to read like a Big Book. It feels like a book behind which a publicity department could gladly get. The construct is perfectly simple: the reader follows, over 20 years (1988-2007), a duo—Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley—checking in with them every July 15th. It’s an innocuous date, intentionally: who hasn’t felt, making his way through easy, nothing-doing days, that those quiet days are as pivotal as any Grand Movement moments? David Nicholls has done a phenomenal job of allowing how inconspicuous moments, the simple, toss-off asides of day-to-day life, contain the DNA of all our larger shiftings, all potential unfoldings.

But Dex and Em (as they call themselves in the book): we meet them as they’re about to leave University (sorry, it’s British), track them over two decades through kids, relationships, careers, family deaths, developments, dreams rising and converging and submerging again. I mean this gently, easily: there’s nothing about this book that’s fundamentally surprising; meaning, the point of the book isn’t to read it as a way to be really taken by some event, to be sideswiped by what you can’t see coming, as a reader. No, it’s pretty straight-forward, not real surprising, One Day.

And yet, and yet: I read the book over maybe two days, and though I complained about the book, I finished it quick, somewhat glad I’d involved myself with it to begin with. Why the complaining? Partly because of the book’s lack of surprise, but mostly because the book’s almost sadistically easy to slip into: One Day is compelling, massive evidence for the pure pleasures of narrative, for how compellingly simple it is to ass-plant on a couch and spend a day lost in fictive worlds with fictive folks.

Summer, alas, seems over (it drops below 60˚ at night where I live now, which certainly must be a signal), but the book’s well worth your time, whatever season.

Rickwood Field by Allen Barra

As anyone who reads this with regularity will know, I’m all for the baseball books. Gimme Zirin, gimme Jonathan Mahler, gimme Halberstam by the yard: I’ll read whatever baseball book is available (coming soon: a review of Michael Weinreb’s Bigger than the Game, which features a couple baseball moments and, honestly, is one of the top-3 sports books of the year, the thing’s just a powerhouse and Weinreb’s now someone to watch very, very closely–the man can do anything).

And so I read Rickwood Field, the story of America’s oldest ballpark, with a good mix of cheer and interest, even if the park’s in Birmingham, Alabama, and was home not to any team I’ve loved (Twins/Senators, Cards, Cubs) but to the Birmingham Barons, both black and white. My grandpa didn’t live to be 100 but had tremendous stories, and, of course, Rickwood Field’s stories from all 100 of its years are spectacular. The headline-nabbers—Babe Ruth hit (maybe) baseball’s longest home run ever there; Hank Aaron played there when he was in the Negro Leagues, Jackie Robinson and a rookie Willie Mays played each other in the Negro Leagues World Series there—are fantastic, but what Barra offers, through the story of a single baseball stadium in Birmingham, is a cross-cut view of the south in the 20th century, living uneasily through the heaves and spasms and desegregation.

It’s a fantastic book, though one that ends up raising questions, simply by virtue of the fact that Rickwood, though it still stands, is now a hall of nostalgia: the Birmingham Barons play in nearbye Hoover, Alabama. So questions arise: what sort of baseball stadium is it if no baseball’s played? And want to know at least part of the reason the stadium didn’t get toppled in the 80′s? Would you believe it had anything to do with Hollywood, and the fact that several movies were filmed there? It’s true. It’s not at all a bad thing, it’s simply true.

I live in Iowa, and, over in the east part of the state, one can stop and visit the farm at which they filmed the movie Field of Dreams. It’s a strangely hard stop to make, at least for me—in the movie, if you’ll remember, the story goes and continues because of people keeping faith, because of people being willing to show up and pay for the pleasure of witnessing a good game. It’s fantastic that Rickwood Field is 100 years old (as of a month ago, literally), and it should stay standing; however, in this time of a new field ever year or so for professional teams, Rickwood casts a spooky charge, posing questions about nostalgia and utility and how we’ll square all that. Read it; consider it.

Two New Books

by Weston Cutter

Coal River by Michael Shnayerson

 

As someone who lives in the Southeast, relatively close to the sort of strip mining and mountaintop removal under scrutiny and lament in Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River, I was both embarrassed to find out how bad the situation was and is, but, way worse, I was amazed to read that all this is happening right around here and yet I’ve seen not the first bit of it. It’s not, I don’t think, because I’m a dolt or uninterested; mountaintop removal, a process of coal mining that’s not even cleverly enough named to cover its own devastation, is happening out here in the sticks, so to speak. Which, of course, makes sense: it’s easy to get up in arms about, say, the pollution of the Mississippi River (a river I worked on for enough years to see, firsthand, the real tremendous pollution of (and, in fairness, the late and gradual cleanup of)) because people live right near it. Mining coal in mountains that line and limn tiny communities in out-of-the-way parts of the country is a sneaky, ongoing fact, and more than anything we all—those of us living in places freakishly near the mining, those of you far, far from it—need to know more about the whole thing.

And into this need comes Michael Shnayerson and his great book—a book which is, in fairness, almost equally about the absolute catastrophe that is mining in the southeast of the United States and about the equal catastrophe that is the EPA and governmental oversight of industry in general. Shnayerson, by the way, is exactly the pilot you want in this sort of literary plane ride: he’s a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and has written about drug-resistant bacteria and GM’s electric car. He’s the sort of guy you want feeding you details when you come to a problem that’s tough on scales both large and small, which coal mining absolutely is.

The book is basically all about how small, resolute West Virginians kept on fighting a guy named Don Blackenship, a guy who works for Massey Energy. The West Virginians have, as you’d expect, pluck and diligence and what seems inarguably the smart argument on their side; Blackenship and Massey energy have, of course, money and power and, in ways that should shake any environmentalist right down to his or her boots, Massey’s got the status quo. If nothing else, this book’s a(nother, like we need more, but we always will) terrifying account of how the phrase “this is how things’ve always been done” might actually be a more destructive phrase and mentality than anything like WMD or Axis of Evil or whatever.

And the fighting! What’s sick is that these small-town West Virginians have to argue, over and over, that coal particulates in the air around them are increasing and that that might be a bad thing. The sick part isn’t the specifics, but the general: people have to fight for clean air. It’s wildly disturbing. Plus—and this’ll surprise no one who has paid unit of energy #1 to the goings-on of the EPA under President Bush’s administration—the book is largely about forcing governmental agencies to do their own jobs. No shit. (for a fun refresher, Google some recent news stories about how the EPA had to be sued into regulating CO2. True story).

It’s not just that there’s a clear, heroic, David v. Goliath like fight at the heart of this book that makes it so great, though that’s a huge deal: if you can get through this book without loving Joe Lovett, the good-guy lawyer, and without an almost DNA-deep level dread of and revulsion toward Don Blackenship (and Massey Energy), bravo (and also, my apologies: you’ve got no heart). One of the most absurd things, I think, about reading and loving books is that they somehow expand worlds and experiences precisely by narrowing the world’s horizon to the edges of a page. We all know that bad shit’s happening, environmentally, and we all know we should do something, and most of us seem to say we’d like to know more about how bad it is and what we can do. What can we do? Make better decisions, use less energy, etc—this isn’t the place for any preaching. What we can all do, however, to know more, is to read books like Michael Shnayerson’s Coal River, read books like this and pass the books along to friends and strangers and try to make everyone pay attention, fast.

(for those who want more reading material, check out the NYTimes article dated 15 January. Google Blackenship for more stomach-churning reading.) 

 

 

Game of Kings by Michael Weinreb

 

So, this book, along with Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air, is at the top of my list of books I wish I’d known about when they’d come out in hardcover. It’s not like it’s that huge a deal—this book was released in March of 07 (titled, at the time, The Kings of New York) and a ten-month lag between hardcover and paperback’s actually great—but still, there’s something, to me anyway, about reading a book that’s been out for awhile (and not, like, a long while: I didn’t feel bad getting into old McPhee stuff because I was not living when he wrote half his books), a book I should’ve been onto the minute it was released but, of course, missed (and sure, we all miss as many great books as we read, but it still makes me sad).

Anyway: rectified! Game of Kings is the story of the Edward R. Murrow high school chess team, and the story’s full of exactly the narrative elements that make these sorts of stories so great (there should be a whole subgenre of against-all-odds, high-school stories (the #1 of which would have to be, of course, Joe Miller’s Cross-X, but whatever)). You want underprivileged kids with somewhat dicey backgrounds? Check. A beleaguered coach/teacher working above and beyond and hearable call of duty? Check. Triumph despite the outrageous odds? Check. A whimsical, maybe-this’ll-never-happen-again sort of ending, full of oomph and portent? Check. (I apologize for the dumb “check” punning back there: totally unintentional and it looks dumb. If I’d said Bingo, it’d’ve looked way worse, though).

The fact that the book so clearly follows the code, though—unlikely heroes coming from surprising quarters, basically—actually makes its job tougher. How many books are there like this, you think? Expand it past high school stories, and suddenly you’re contending with any (real generally) against-the-odds type sports-related story (try: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning or Ticket Out). How about pushing it beyond sports? Try Fermat’s Last Theorem. Just play a quick mental game and try to think of as many recent nonfiction books that’ve had the words “surprising” or “unlikely” or some synonym in the subtitle. Go ahead. Try it.

(I’m not going to look it up, but there’ve got to be hundreds).

Understand: I’m not at all against books like these. All the books I’ve named have been great, great fun. But when you get into this sort of territory—where the structure of the narrative is so well-understood that we can, as readers, sort of predict how the next shoe’ll drop—the stakes climb real damn quickly (as a weird, probably faulty analog to this situation, consider the huge variety of bottled water available. It’s all, we know, just water, plain old H2O, but the details suddenly become everything—we want rectangular bottles, or the pretty plastic bottle with the cursive writing, or the water that’s advertised as having been enriched by god knows what).

All of which, I realize, is a real roundabout way to say that books like this, underdog books, have to be written really, really well if they’re going to work. That earlier mention of Joe Miller? Absolute best book re: underdogs—the writing in there, and the emphatic concern on the part of the author, make the book just spellbinding.

But! But. Michael Weinreb. His Game of Kings is, in fact, one of the best nonfiction accounts of underdogs I’ve read in a while, and it’s one of the best because Weinreb can write circles around lots, lots of the folks writing crap like this. At random: “And the room is beginning to come together, and the room is a sight, man, just your average day at Bizarro High School, all these smart-ass intellectuals and hipsters and geniuses and wannabe geniuses and misfits and preppies and born-against thrown together inside an airplane hangar.” (p. 225). (Whether or not you like New Journalists and all they’ve wrought, you can’t help but love, even a little, that Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson’s influence has now spread so far as to be the tone of choice for so much reporting).

On the cover of this new paperback copy, there’s a blurb from Chess Life saying that the book’s “One of the most readable books about chess ever written,” and as someone who reads way more than my share of chess books (I am horribly, horribly sucky at the game, but reading about the folks who can do it well is, usually, pretty great), I absolutely agree. Weinreb’s a sympathetic observer of these strange and motley mix of boys from this strange high school in Brooklyn and you need know little more than the fundamentals of the game to find entry in the stories (though it’s not, like, horrible if you know more than a little—you just get to feel slightly smart when discussions of games get into real specific, pawn-to-d4-type details).

So: read the damn thing already.

(for what it’s worth, simply because it was already named: really, really, read Marc Fisher’s Something In the Air.Unbelievable. It’s about radio. It’ll make you want to either watch Pump Up the Volume or start your own radio station or both).