Beauty, Discipline and the Outside Shot

...Celebrity (including his image as a "brain") is the only real justification for books like Life on the Run...

...Particularly in a long section called "The Seven Seals" (after St...

...When they do, even Novak's grosser hyperbole seems convincing...

...In 1974 the first boy, Bill Bradley, now in his seventh year as a member of the New York Knickerbockers, is with his team on a bus to the Cleveland airport...

...who would think of taking the blood out of the mass...

...But afterward he returned to America, signing with the Knicks in the winter of 1968, and he has been with them ever since...

...Novak believes that the limits and disciplines of sports, like the formal rituals of religion, can momentarily free us from the irredeemable impurities of earthly life...

...And he has been silent until now, refusing major interviews, giving reporters monosyllabic responses, not even succumbing to the temptation of making an endorsement or two...

...For him the batter's box is an altar, a basketball jersey is a sacred vestment, and a faultlessly executed series of pass completions becomes a mass...

...At Princeton he was loved and publicized throughout the world, and he shocked sports fans (and warmed the hearts of their mothers) by accepting a Rhodes scholarship to spend two years at Oxford...

...It externalizes the warfare in our hearts and offers us a means of knowing ourselves and wresting some grace from our true natures...

...Sports are the high point of civilization...

...Sports are symbolic rituals, he feels, and most of what seems wrong with them should be left alone, because it mirrors what is wrong with life...

...The chance to see America, the appreciation of fans who are grateful and the companionship of teammates provide some compensation...

...He works on each shot until it is perfect...

...In McKeesport, Pennsylvania, another boy, about 12, practices catching a football...

...Like Bill Bradley, he justifies his book by describing sports as a transcendent experience, but he goes much farther than Bradley's paean to teamwork...

...The author is adamant in his rejection of athletic hero worship and in his refusal to cash in on so in-authentic a resource, yet this book does precisely that...

...For the limited and formal arena of play does provide an opportunity for competition, nobility and excellence that is simply unavailable in the "serious" world...

...We are rooted in mortality, and "the underlying metaphyics of sports entails overcoming the fear of death...

...Moreover, he systematizes feverishly...

...An Esthetics would have been quite enough...

...Occasionally in sports, such wonderful, inexplicable epiphanies happen...

...What one ultimately takes away from both these books, and from sports, is an appreciation for moments: a boy grabbing a spiral, a team that simply and suddenly clicks, two milers embracing, or, in the words of that great scribe Red Smith, "bases filled, two out, three and two on the hitter and everybody moving with the pitch...

...Dollar Bill Bradley (his salary is $325,00 a year), of course, is special...

...Sympathetic and serious as he is, Bradley is no personal essayist (I still don't know what makes him tick), no sociologist (his biographical sketches of teammates, a good idea, are sketchy in the extreme), and not even an interesting sports writer...

...If only Novak hadn't been quite so serious himself...

...Similarly, he cannot seem to resist making objective righteous statements about the joy of sports, his theme...

...Novak mucks up what could have been a wonderful accomplishment by consistently overstating his case...

...The conversion experience aboard the Long Island Railroad is a paradigm for the whole book...

...Such pessimistic notions about human capabilities also lead Novak to a conservative, essentially anti-Enlightenment political stance that disturbingly twists his views...

...One evening, on the 5:29 train home from Manhattan, he finds himself inexplicably heartened by the prospect of the baseball game that will be on television that night...

...While he has never regained his collegiate brilliance, he is a workmanlike player whose style fits in well with the Knicks', and a fine outside shooter (those lonesome hours payed off...

...Michael Novak also wields a damper, of a slightly different gauge...

...Indeed, Life on the Run is enjoyable mostly for the Knick gossip, the "really like" parts, and true to his confused intentions Bradley put a damper on our fun by referring to only seven of his teammates by name...

...and basketball is more akin to jazz than anything else, a loose forum for brilliant improvisation...

...Novak's head can't appreciate his heartfelt love of sports, feels guilty, and confesses by protesting far too much...

...baseball is a leisurely embodiment of the faith in rules and structure that begat this country...

...Consequently, the temptation is to overpraise or overcriticize...

...Life on the Run owes its existence to a somewhat dubious genre that has flourished since the late '60s when Jerry Kramer of the Green Bay Packers wrote Instant Replay...

...Bradley is convincing on his raisons de jouer, but I was still dissatisfied by this journal of three weeks with the Knicks in 1974...

...I take it as symptomatic of his extravagance that in an entire apostrophe to sports, he never even mentions the simple value of physical exercise...

...A genuine love of sports shines through the murky theory, and he has fine, occasionally exciting sensitivity to the rhythms and values underlying our three national games: Football is a union of the corporate myth of organization and power with the strain of violence in America...

...In Life on the Run Bradley presumably tells all...

...It turns out, in fact, he is not that exciting a guy either, and since his personality dominates the pages, the reader suffers: We don't want or need a two-page description of Bill Bradley getting a massage...

...The second boy, Michael Novak, is an author and teacher...

...What is most bothersome about The Joy of Sports is Novak's consistent and unadvertised religious framework...

...In Bradley's case, the issue is compounded by the fact that he, a Princeton man and husband of a college professor, is not only writing about basketball, but has devoted the best years of his life to the game...

...He is still loved...

...What the resulting volumes share, besides the misty emotions of childhood and more immediate origins in a burst of meaning and purpose along a Damascan road or railroad, is a defensive stance toward their past...

...A book, then, that justifies itself with a combination of social criticism and revelation...

...John, not Bergman), Novak is convincing on the wonders sports truly can uncover...

...To "create" such a work, an athlete carries a tape recorder with him and speaks into it daily about whatever enters his mind...

...Louis Hawks basketball team...

...Reviewed by Ben Yagoda In Crystal City, Missouri, a 14-year-old boy practices basketball every day for hours in an empty gym...

...Football, deeply involved with original sin, "is an almost revelatory liturgy...

...If I may be permitted to violate the New Criticism and introduce biographical data to this discussion, it appears that the distortions have been caused by four of Novak's personal characteristics: He is a sports fanatic, a philosopher, a conservative, and a Catholic...

...As he watches an ugly urban spectacle through the window, he decides to write a book about being a professional athlete in America...

...The only sounds are the thump of the ball against wood and steel, and the boy's voice as it pretends to announce the St...

...One can be tolerant of his loving Notre Dame and using the simile "like an angel" three times, but Catholicism forms his whole appreciation of sport...

...Novak's distortions are particularly unfortunate because The Joy of Sports has the makings of an excellent book...

...He knows that he is obliged to write a book about sports...

...What Bradley ultimately plays for, however, is the money (we should have guessed) and the rare moments of exhilarating perfection that sometimes take place in the game: "no one else can sense the inexorable tightness of the moment...

...Football, he gloats, "gives the lie to those who believe that the human being is fundamentally rational, liberal, peaceable, sweetly cooperative...

...They are attempts to implicitly answer an implicitly felt question: Why is a grown-up "intellectual" wasting his time writing about sports...

...in any event, to exaggerate the importance and influence of playing games...

...The memory is one of the most beautiful of his childhood...

...He continually Iambasts those "liberals" and "rationalists" who, for example, want to reduce the violence in sports...

...I sense an immediate transporting enthusiasm and a feeling that everything is in perfect balance, basketball, when a certain level of unselfish team play is realized, can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation...

...Each afternoon he and a friend go to a vacant lot and develop plays...

...We do look at the sports page first...

...I think it not too unfair to quote the following out of context, for it is true to the tone and thought of The Joy of Sports: "the sports pages print the critical dispatches from the realm of permanent reality...

...Although Quadrangle assures us that Bradley actually wrote Life on the Run himself (and I find that easy to believe), it undoubtedly belongs to the burgeoning category...

...The boy deceives imaginary defenders, twists and feints, and the ball is always there waiting for him...

...He should have realized that the best sports writing has always been irrevocably and admittedly subjective...

...there is something almost sacred and quite irrational about the way an athlete experiences time and space, the passionate identification of fan with team or player with teammates, the quality of spirit that goes into a superb athletic performance...

...This, to a degree, is a muckraking sports book, and we learn that the life of a pro basketball player is lonely, full of sham and ungrateful fans, lacking any touch of security...

...Faithful to one of his idols, Aristotle, he has given us an Ethics, Politics and Metaphysics, and thrown in a Thomistic Summa Theologica of sports...

...His problem is that the last three won't let the first alone...

...More often than not, man is not good enough for the field of play (just as in Catholicism he is not good enough for God): "But the failures of human flesh to measure up to the beauties possible in sports should not deter us from pursuing what is in them that so draws our love...

...His words are collected and edited at the end of the season, usually by a collaborator, and published...