129 Great Sports Novels – Where Are They? (with Mike Palindrome and Reagan Sova)

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson

Arts, History, Books

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every year, the Super Bowl draws over 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone, and the Olympics and World Cup will be watched by billions around the world. Movies and television shows about sports are too numerous to count. But where are the novels? Mike Palindrome and special guest Reagan Sova (author of Tiger Island, a novel about sports) join host Jacke Wilson to talk about the world of sports in literature – and attempt to determine why sports are so underrepresented in adult literary fiction. Works discussed include: Underworld by Don DeLillo, The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby, Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams) by W.P. Kinsella, Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Beowulf, The Shortest Poem in the English Language by Muhammad Ali, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. *** This show is a part of the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you're listening to The History of Literature, we'd like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows surrounding literature, history, and storytelling like Storybound, Micheaux Mission, and The History of Standup. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.
0:07.0	I heard him once talking to the Harvard Senior Class commencement.
0:15.4	He gave this extraordinary speech, you know he was dyslexic and he would look at a paper with me and he
0:22.2	say,
0:22.5	hey George, what's this word mean?
0:24.2	I'd say appendicitis.
0:25.2	And he said, how do you get a word like appendicitis?
0:27.0	It's so long and so long.
0:29.6	Here he was teaching, delivering a lecture, senior class day to these 2000, 2,000 Harvard
0:36.0	graduates and he had these little cars in front of me and gave this wonderful
0:41.7	speech about he hadn't had the opportunity but they had and they should use that language that learning that they had to go out and do their best to change the world to make it a better place.
0:50.0	It was it was moving and it was funny at the same time and a great raw of appreciation at the end of it and then someone shouted out give us a poem and everybody quiet it down.
1:01.0	Now the shortest poem in the English language according to Bartner's quotations is is called on the antiquity of microbes and the poem is Adam Hanham. It's pretty short.
1:11.0	But Mohamed Ali's poem was,
1:13.2	me, we, two words. I wrote about his quotations and I said,
1:20.3	look here, that's shorter than Adam, Adam,
1:22.4	you want to put it in? And it stands for something
1:25.1	more than the poem itself. Me, we, what a fighter he was, and what a man.
1:30.0	That's author George Clipton talking about the great Mohammed Ali, Heavyweight Champion of the
1:35.4	world and incidentally a great summer Olympian.
1:40.0	Here we are on the eve of the Winter Olympics.
1:42.1	We're talking about sports and literature today
	...

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