Australia Was the Best Modern Olympic Host (Quote of the Day / ‘The Olympic Games’)

If the International Olympic Committee gave awards for hosting the summer games of the past quarter century, China would deserve the booby prize for embarrassments that began with lip sync-ing at the opening ceremony and keep unfolding. What country was the best recent host? The editors of The Olympic Games: Athens 1896–Athens 2004 (DK, 2004) vote for Australia:

“The Sydney 2000 Games were one of the greatest success stories in Olympic history. Over 10,000 athletes from 200 countries delivered the ultimate sporting even in a suberb venue.

“At the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Games, outgoing president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Juan Antonio Samaranch declared to the host nation, ‘I am proud and happy to proclaim that you have presented to the world the best Olympic Games ever.’ Quite a plaudit, but one few would argue with. Everything seemed perfect – the organization, the athletic performance, the setting, the climate …

“The only blot on the Sydney Games was the rash of athletes removed after failing drugs tests – a record total of 35. However, it is undeniable that the Sydney Games were the high watermark of the modern Olympics, and something that future Olympic hosts will have to live up to.”

This comment comes from a publisher that, though well-respected, is based in London www.dk.com. Do you agree with the editors? Or do you think their comments show a Commonwealth bias?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

‘Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila’ – A Portrait of the First African to Win a Gold Medal at the Olympics

The band couldn’t find the Ethiopian national anthem when a former bodyguard for Haile Selassie became the first man to win back-to-back gold medals in the signature event of the Olympics

Barefoot Runner: The Life of Marathon Champion Abebe Bikila. By Paul Rambali. Serpent’s Tail, 315 pp., $20, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

This is a very strange book about the first African to win a gold medal at the Olympics and the man some regard as the greatest marathoner of all time. Born in rural Ethiopia, Abebe Bikila served as a bodyguard for Emperor Haile Selassie before running barefoot to his first gold medal at the Rome games in 1960. Four years later, wearing shoes and socks in Tokyo, Bikila became the first man to win back-to-back gold medals in the marathon:

“Bikila was so euphoric that it mattered not if the band could not find the score for the Ethiopian national anthem … and played the Japanese anthem instead,” David Miller writes in Athens to Athens.

Journalist Paul Rambali tells Bikila’s story in a book that its publisher bills as a biography but that reads more like a novelization. From the first sentence onward, Rambali uses the literary device of limited omniscient narration: He goes inside Bikila’s head and, in alternating chapters, that of his coach, Onni Niskanen, and describes thoughts he appears to have had no way of knowing.

This device might have worked beautifully in a brief children’s biography, an art form that allows more leeway for the technique. As it is, too much of Barefoot Runner defies belief for a work labeled “nonfiction.”

Bikila died of a brain hemorrhage in his early 40s, which may help to explain why no definitive biography of him has appeared, nearly a half century after he struck gold in Rome. But lesser athletes have had better books written about them. The world will owe a debt to anyone who gives this great Olympian the great biography he deserves.

Best line: Rambali explains why Bikila ran barefoot in Rome, though he provides no source for it. He says that when Bikila, among other runners, went to the Adidas stand in the Olympic village to get shoes, there were no shoes that fit him: “His big toes were too large and his outside toes too small. ‘They’re almost ingrown,’ said the Adidas man. He was curious about Abebe’s feet and said he had never seen anything like them: the soles and heels were as hard as corns! He told the major [Onni Niskanen] they had given away 1,500 pairs of shoes and they had hardly any left … They couldn’t find a pair of shoes anywhere that Abebe was comfortable with and finally the major had decided that, since there wouldn’t be time to properly break in a new pair, Abebe would race barefoot.”

Worst line: “The old women shouted questions at him as he passed. He was always running, it was true. If he didn’t answer them, it wasn’t because he was out breath, for he was never out of breath.” This early comment sets the tone for the rest of the book. Has the world ever had a distance runner who was “never out of breath”?

Published: June 2007 www.serpentstail.com/book?id=10906

Furthermore: A recent review in the Guardian says that Tim Judah takes a more journalistic approach to Bikila’s life in his Bikila: Ethiopia’s Marathon Champion (Reportage Press, 2008), which doesn’t appear to have reached the U.S. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/27/sportandleisure?gusrc=rss&feed=books, and provides a useful comparison of that book and Barefoot Runner.

Janice Harayda is a novelist and award-winning journalist.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

A Good Sports Book for Middle-School and Older Students

Good news for anyone who is looking for a well-written sports book for middle-school and older students: Phillip Hoose’s Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me (Walker, 176 pp., $10.95, paperback, ages 10 and up) www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/ has come out in paperback. In this lively memoir Hoose www.philliphoose.com remembers when he was in the fourth grade and his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. Walker Books www.walkerbooks.com/books/catalog.php?key=614 is rightly cross-marketing this book to adults and adolescents, both of whom may especially enjoy its moment-by-moment account of Larsen’s perfect game. The bright new cover art for the paperback edition, shown here, should heighten its appeal for young readers. Perfect, Once Removed was named one of the Top 10 Sports Books of 2007 by Bill Ott for the American Library Association’s Booklist.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Mark Bowden Remembers ‘The Best Game Ever’ and the Birth of Sudden-Death Overtime in National Football League Championship Play

To judge by the Amazon ratings for Black Hawk Down – a total of 672 reviews, not one less than four stars – I’m among the few who thought that Mark Bowden’s account of the bungled 1993 American military raid in Somalia was overrated. So although I’m in no rush to read Bowden’s new book about the first National Football League championship game decided in sudden-death overtime, I’d like to mention the most authoritative review of it that I’ve seen so far.

Jonathan Yardley wrote of The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL (Atlantic Monthly, 279 pp., $23) in the Washington Post:

“It’s considerably more than a play-by-play account, though Bowden does manage to build up a surprising amount of suspense. Both pro football and the United States were very different half a century ago, and Bowden understands that this game caught both the league and the nation at a moment of deep and lasting change. … Early in his career Bowden covered professional football for the Philadelphia Inquirer, an experience that serves him well here. His explanations of shifts in the teams’ offensive and defensive strategies are lucid, and he knows enough about the extreme physical and mental demands the game exacts to convey a strong sense of the players’ exhaustion and determination as the game ground toward its conclusion. He isn’t entirely immune to journalistic cliché and at times overwrites, but generally his prose is competent and clear.”

Yardley also says that while Bowden respects the 1958 Giants, “this is a Colt fan’s book.” To read his full review, click here before the Post packs it off an archive:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/06/ST2008060602105.html. A slide show of the game that accompanies the review. The Atlantic Monthy Press site www.groveatlantic.com has additional information.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

When Girls’ Sports Injuries Go Beyond the Soccer Field

On May 11 the New York Times Magazine published a cover story provocatively headlined: “Everyone Wants Girls to Have As Many Opportunities in Sports as Boys. But Can We Live With the Greater Rate of Injuries They Suffer?” www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html. Written by Michael Sokolove, the article focused on soccer injuries, especially ruptures of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Journalist Joan Ryan explores the physical and emotional risks of two other popular sports in Little Girls in Pretty Boxes The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters (Warner, 2000), a chilling exposé of the exploitation of young female gymnasts and skaters. The book grew out of an award-winning series Ryan wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle and became a 1997 made-for-TV movie www.imdb.com/title/tt0119551/.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

One of the Year’s Best Books About High School Sports, Mark Kreidler’s ‘Four Days to Glory,’ Returns in a Paperback Edition

Masterly reporting sheds light on an athletic subculture little-known outside the Midwest

You can’t envy parents, teachers and librarians who are looking for sports books for high school students. So many books in the category are cheesy celebrity biographies that foster the worship of false demigods instead of a love of reading or a real understanding of competition. Not Mark Kreidler’s Four Days to Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland (Harper, 285 pp., $13.95, paperback, ages 13 and up), which recently came out in paperback www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/. Two high school wrestlers prepare to compete in the Iowa state championship in this book of masterly reporting that offers a fascinating portrait of a little-known athletic subculture www.markkreidler.com and www.harpercollins.com. Mary Ann Harlan rightly said in School Library Journal: “Teen wrestlers will appreciate a book that speaks to them and respectfully about them, and sports fans may find a new area to appreciate.”

Reviews of books for children or teenagers appear every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews, a site for people who like to read but dislike hype and review inflation. You can find other reviews in the “Children’s Books,” “Young Adult,” “Caldecott Medals” and “Newbery Medals” categories at right.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

‘Baseball Haiku’: World-Class Poems About the Seasons of a Sport

Poems that speak to the emotions of Red Sox and Rockies fans today

Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball. Edited and With Translations by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura. Norton, 214 pp., $19.95.

By Janice Harayda

“Haiku and baseball were made for each other: While haiku give us moments in which nature is linked to human nature, baseball is played in the midst of the natural elements — on a field under an open sky; and as haiku happen in a timeless now, so does baseball, for there is no clock ticking in a baseball game — the game’s not over until the last out.”

With those words, Cor van den Heuvel sets the tone for this exemplary anthology of more than 200 of the finest haiku about baseball written by American and Japanese poets. Most Americans think of haiku as poems of 17 syllables, typically arranged in a 5-7-5 pattern on three stepped or flush-left lines.

But van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura show how much more flexible the form can be than the traditional pattern might suggest. Van den Heuvel notes, for example, that the best American practitioners of the art typically write free-verse haiku that have fewer than 17 syllables.

Consider the work of the Kansas-born Michael Fessler, who shows how nature can affect baseball in a poem that portrays the game as few of us see it played today: “dust storm trick: / infielders / face the outfield.” Fessler’s haiku suggests the layers of meaning that gifted poets can find in as few as 15 syllables: The word “trick” refers both the players’ shift of position and to a trick of nature, the dust storm. And the poem quietly conveys the passions aroused by baseball, a sport people will play in blinding storms.

Each author in Baseball Haiku gets an intelligent, one-page introduction that mentions a team that influenced him or her. But even without that material you might guess that the Maine-born van den Heuvel is “a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox” from one of his own poems that appears in the book, an homage to Ted Williams: “Ted hits another homer / a seagull high over right field / gets out of the way.”

Like all good poetry, the best haiku in this book transcend fandom and evoke deep and, if not universal, at least transoceanic emotions. One comes from the Japanese poet Yotsuya Ryu, known for his ability to capture fleeting moments in nature. He wrote its words years ago. But this one’s for you, Rockies fans: “until raised to Heaven / I’ll go to fields of green / carrying my glove.”

Published: June 2007 www.wwnorton.co

Furthermore: All the Japanese poems in Baseball Haiku include their original text and an English translation. More haiku appear at www.simplyhaiku.com. Van den Heuvel nows lives in New York City and Tamura in Japan.

You may also enjoy: The June 18, 2008, post on this site “Basketball Poems for Celtics Fans and Others” www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Waving a Red-and-White Towel for ‘Veeck — As in Wreck’: The Best Book Ever Written About Cleveland Baseball?

He sent a midget to the plate in St. Louis, inadvertently caused a fan riot in Chicago and brought the first black player, Larry Doby, into the American League in Cleveland

By Janice Harayda

One of the first things I asked my new co-workers after I moved to Ohio to become the book editor of the Plain Dealer was, “What are the best books about Cleveland?” Many people mentioned the memoirs of the most colorful owner in the history of the Cleveland Indians, Veeck — As in Wreck : The Autobiography of Bill Veeck, by Bill Veeck with Ed Linn, with a foreword by Bob Verdi (University of Chicago Press, $16, paperback).

I later learned that ardent baseball fans regard this straight-talking book as one of the best ever written about the sport. And its admirers include the ex-baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who listed it among his five favorites in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

“Bill Veeck’s memoir is an irreverent and funny account of his days as an unorthodox baseball owner — and indeed he did try some silly tricks to draw crowds,” Vincent wrote. “Sometimes he went over the line, as with Eddie Gaedel, the midget he sent up to bat for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, and ‘Disco Demolition Night,’ which turned into a fan riot in 1979, when he owed the Chicago White Sox. But Veeck also made a serious and singular contribution to the game in 1947 when, as the owner of the Cleveland Indians, he brought the first black player, Larry Doby, into the American League. But because Jackie Robinson preceded Doby into the major leagues by a few months, both Doby and Veeck have been somewhat overlooked … Bill Veeck may have been a bit of a wreck, but he deserves much more attention and credit than he has received.”

One sign of the enduring importance of Veeck — As in Wreck is that its latest edition comes from the distinguished University of Chicago Press (which, it’s safe to say, is not going to be publishing Dennis Rodman‘s Bad as I Wanna Be a half century from now). You might say that the book, first published in 1962, is the rare sports memoir for which fans still wave the literary equivalent those red-and-white Tribe towels that you’ve seen if you’ve watched the American League Championship Series. You can read an excerpt from Veeck — As in Wreck on site for the University of Chicago Press: www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/852180.html.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Phillip Hoose Remembers When His Cousin, Don Larsen, Pitched the Only Perfect Game in World Series History

A baseball memoir that speaks both to young fans and those old enough to miss the days when players smoked Camels in the dugout

Perfect, Once Removed: When Baseball Was All the World to Me. By Phillip Hoose. Walker, 176 pp., $19.95.

By Janice Harayda

Baseball books tend to preach to the bleachers. If you don’t understand the infield fly-rule or the job of a short-reliever, you can’t necessarily expect any help from their authors, who typically take a certain amount of knowledge – if not fanaticism – for granted.

Perfect, Once Removed is the rare baseball book that has something for fans at all levels. In this lively memoir Phillip Hoose tells how his cousin once removed, Don Larsen, pitched a perfect game for the Yankees against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series and, in doing so, helped him adjust to being a fourth-grader in Speedway, Indiana. The book could have become an exercise in special pleading for a famous relative. But Perfect, Once Removed gives such balanced view of Hoose’s and Larsen’s entwined stories that it may appeal to many people besides baby boomers who love to recall the great Yankee-Dodger games of yore, including a baseball-loving adolescents.

Part of the charm of Perfect, Once Removed is that Hoose respects his fourth-grade views and resists the impulse to correct them in hindsight, though he ends with a catch-up visit with then 76-year-old Larsen. He recalls that in the 1950s, ballplayers endorsed cigarettes so often that he created a scrapbook of the ads:

“To a man, these ballplayers reported that smoking helped them relax. They all enjoyed the mildness of a Camel. A cigarette before a game helped them perform better, and a butt in the locker room afterward helped them unwind. As Mickey Mantle put it, ‘For mildness and flavor, you can’t beat Camels!’ It all made sense to me.”

Hoose isn’t endorsing smoking, just recalling how he reacted to all that puffing by his heroes. And that kind of frankness help to give his book a relevance that extends beyond the personal. Perfect, Once Removed isn’t just family story. It’s a book about the way baseball used to be and a useful antidote to the tendency to idealize the past. If you think steroids are ruining the game, consider this: Would you prefer that ballplayers were still in endorsing Camels in major magazines?

Best line: One of many colorful details in this book involves how the catcher for Larsen’s perfect game celebrated the event: “Yogi Berra promptly went out and had his catcher’s mitt bronzed.”

Worst line: Hoose says that he has re-created some dialogue but that his book is “entirely accurate as to what was said and how it was said.” This claim is generally credible. It is much less so when he says that the Dodger fans on the school playground told him: “Your cousin sucks.” In 1956 they would have said, “Your cousin stinks.”

Editor: George Gibson

Published: October 2006 www.philliphoose.com

Recommendation? An excellent gift for a reader who loves to recall the days of demigods like Mantle, Berra and their teammates. School Library Journal also recommends Perfect, Once Removed for high school students (and it may appeal to some baseball fans as young as 10 or 11). This is a good book to read aloud to sports-loving children too old for picture books, especially moment-by-moment account of Larsen’s perfect game in Chapter 8.

Caveat lector: This review was based on the advance reading edition. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Furthermore: Hoose also wrote the award-winning The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20), a nonfiction book about the ivory-billed woodpecker that appeared on many “Best Books of 2004” lists.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Mark Kreidler’s Peak Peformance in Sportswriting, ‘Four Days to Glory’

Teenage wrestlers hurl themselves at their limits as the Iowa state championship approaches

Four Days to Glory: Wrestling With the Soul of the American Heartland. By Mark Kreidler, 262 pp., $24.95

By Janice Harayda

Read enough books by newspaper sportswriters and you will eventually begin to question the principle of freedom of speech. It’s not that these journalists are lazy or unintelligent. But they typically write books about superstars who are so young and so focused on one sport that they have almost nothing to say. And because the athletes are in high demand, they also have little time to give to a book. The sportswriters have to stretch an inadequate number of interviews to tissue-thinness, then flesh them out with tedious rehashes of games that were far more dramatic on ESPN. To see how unedifying the result can be, you need only to read Moving the Chains, the 2006 biography of the Patriots’ Tom Brady by Charles Pierce of The Boston Globe. Any six-inch news story on recent events in Brady’s personal life might tell you more about the quarterback.

Meet Mark Kreidler, a sportswriter who makes you glad that the founders of our country wrote that Bill of Rights. The dust jacket of Four Days to Glory says he has worked for two California newspapers, but his book is far from the usual hagiographic cut-and-paste job. It’s a terrific portrait of high school wrestling in Iowa, a powerhouse in the sport, and a fascinating look at a subculture almost unknown outside the Midwest. If you think the people who bark after every touchdown at Browns games are obsessed, you should meet Iowa wrestlers.

Four Days to Glory tells the story of two high school seniors, Jay Borschel and Dan LeClere, both three-time state champions who aim to join the elite who have won a fourth title. But Kreidler has expanded his focus to include the boys’ families, coaches and teammates, so that his book is always about more than wrestling: It’s about the gut-wrenching impact of the quest on everybody involved. It’s also about the complexities of Iowa, a place where tickets to the state high school wrestling final sell out months in advance, yet nobody scalps tickets because, as one father said, “It would be unsportsmanlike to scalp at an event like this.”

As he follows Borschel and LeClere to the tournament, Kreidler avoids digressions into the less savory aspects of their sport – the steroids, the latent homoeroticism and the potential for eating disorders among athletes who must weigh in for every match. This may disappoint anyone looking for the wrestling equivalent of Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, Joan Ryan’s superb exposé abuses in gymnastics and figure-skating. But Four Days to Glory works beautifully on its own terms. Kreidler says that Iowa wrestlers adopt slogans such as PAIN IS TEMPORARY, PRIDE IS FOREVER. And although his young subjects may not know it yet, this book gives them another reason to feel proud.

Best line: Four Days to Glory has two great walk-offs in the endings for the book and its epilogue. They are close to perfection. Unfortunately, quoting them would be like telling you who dies at the end of the new Harry Potter novel.

Worst line: Kreidler says that Dan Gable, who won a gold medal in wrestling at the Munich Olympics in 1972, was “the most acclaimed athlete of his time.” Mark, does the name Muhammad Ali mean anything to you? How about Hank Aaron, John Havlicek, Mark Spitz or Billie Jean King? The statement about Gable is so bizarre, it has to be a mistake: Kreidler must mean that he was the “most acclaimed” in wrestling. You hope.

Recommendation? Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, remember this one when you’re looking for a gift for that sports-loving teenage boy in December.

Editor: Dave Hirshey

Published: February 2007 www.markkreidler.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com