I am not a big sports fan, but I can understand the pleasures of getting involved with sports, whether playing them or watching and following them. When I was in high school (I went to two), I enthusiastically cheered my schools’ teams, and whether they won or not seemed life-or-death important. When I was in my mid-to-late teens living in Michigan, my family followed the Detroit Tigers baseball team avidly, attending games, watching games on TV, and listening to games on the radio when we were traveling. I even remember when I pulled back from that enthusiastic support for the team, because it was too devastating when they lost. It is hard for me now to remember such strong feelings about sports! I do, in a general sort of way, support our local (San Francisco) teams: the 49ers and the Giants in particular. My husband is a big sports fan; he plays tennis himself, and watches tennis, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, and occasionally other sports as well, occasionally live but mostly on TV. I sometimes sit down for a few minutes to watch too. But I prefer -- big surprise! -- to read fiction about sports, when it is well written and about something larger than the sports themselves. Below is a list of some of the best sports novels, many by some of our best American writers. I can’t claim to have read them all, but I know at least a bit about each of them, and they are all highly regarded critically. Note that the most predominant sport represented is baseball, which apparently truly is “the great American pastime.”
Bang the Drum Slowly, by Mark Harris (baseball)
The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth (baseball)
The Harder They Fall, by Budd Schulberg (boxing)
The Legend of Bagger Vance, by Steven Pressfield (golf)
The Natural, by Bernard Malamud (baseball)
North Dallas Forty, by Peter Gent (football)
A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean (fishing)
Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella (baseball)
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
The Sweetheart Season, by Karen Ann Fowler (women’s baseball)
You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner (baseball)
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