MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Similar strike rates on field and page
Maturing nicely, and all the sweeter because nobody — nobody! — would surely have picked up on this tasty morsel from the less-travelled boreens of the sporting life.
Then, disaster. A quick flick through the Sunday newspapers and the heart-sinking sensation... you realise your idea has already been used, and is therefore dead as Dillinger.
In this case it was the correspondence of J M Coetzee and Paul Auster, two unlikely sports fans but knowledgeable enough to exchange letters on Roger Federer’s technique.
As Liz Lemon found out recently in 30 Rock, you need a Plan B, and luckily I had my Plan B, and it worked pretty well but, just for the record, thanks, Eamon Sweeney.
In any event I didn’t want to let that thread of sport and writers unravel (untie itself? Unthread itself? Un-something-else altogether?) so I clocked that the one and only Philip Roth was 80 last week, an event marked by a sparkling literary soiree in New York. What caught my eye in reports of the festivities was the occasional nod to sport, and baseball in particular, like Roth’s comparison of writing and America’s pastime (“writing’s a lot like baseball, you fail two-thirds of the time”).
No surprises there. After Roth wrote about much-put-upon liver (Portnoy’s Complaint) but long before he wrote the most frightening novel any father of girls could read (American Pastoral, I had nightmares), he wrote an entire novel about baseball.
Despite its title (The Great American Novel), I doubt if anyone reckons it’s one of his best, but an occasional interest in baseball isn’t my focus here. What’s always interested me is his depiction of a particular type, the high school athlete who carries his favoured status into adulthood.
In American Pastoral the father figure is Swede Levov, an all-star athlete in high school who moves in to comfortable business life until disaster strikes him later in life. Anyone who’s read or watched Friday Night Lights (book, movie or TV series) will be aware of the cachet that accrues to successful sportspeople who aren’t old enough to vote, or drink legally, in the States — and how quickly that evaporates if they don’t make the transition to the professional ranks.
I often wonder why there isn’t an Irish equivalent, a novel about the outstanding county minor hurler or footballer or colleges star who never quite makes it at senior level, and how the adulation of the teenage years prepares someone for low-key adulthood, which is something we all live with. The reason I ask the question about the depiction of GAA players, above, is that we’re all familiar with the rugby equivalent, a Mr O’Carroll-Kelly who has been keeping us abreast of his life for many years.
Maybe someone will try a Philip Roth-John Updike disappointed teenage GAA star novel. If so, they could take encouragement from Roth’s comment about writing: you end up failing two-thirds of the time anyway.
