Glenn W. Ferguson. Sports in America: Fascination and Blemishes.
Walker, Matthew
Glenn W. Ferguson. Sports in America: Fascination and Blemishes.
Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2004. 134 pp. Cloth, $26.95.
John C. Turner. Life's Bounces: One Man's Generational
Journey Linked by Golf, the Game He Loved. New York: iUniverse, 2004.
196 pp. Paper, $14.95.
It might seem improbable to juxtapose these two works into an
omnibus-review, one a far-ranging critique of contemporary sports, the
other a memory novel of a promising golfer whose athletic career was
forever shattered by a heroic sacrifice during World War Two. But taken
together, read within the same week, these books reveal an intriguing
common ground, two amateur writers, two amateur jocks, who share an
amateur's love of sports, two men looking back on a half-century
that has reshaped athletics in America and who see sports as endangered,
a vestige of courage and heroics all but lost in a culture that has
grown too fond of the simple arithmetic of winning and bank accounts and
has managed to forget the guts and heart of true competition.
Glenn Ferguson, a career diplomat and president of four different
universities, explores with the casual care and gentle energy of a
lifelong sports enthusiast the peculiarities and quirky oddities of a
range of sports from baseball to hunting. He is particularly fond of
baseball but generously touches on virtually all sports, including the
Olympics. His is a lifetime spent indulging the joy of sports--he admits
in his Introduction his George Plimpton-like sampling of a wide variety
of sports in his early life, an experience that taught him the joy of
competition, the mental work of strategy, and the fierce bond of
teammates.
Along the way, as he offers modest insights into these sports,
Ferguson offers as well an assortment of modest proposals for adjusting
what he sees as the principle issues gnawing at the very moral fiber of
competitive sports in contemporary America: lingering racial bias,
persistent jingoism, the insidious incursion of drugs, and supremely the
lure of the uncountable billions that sports generates. Given the wide
range of Ferguson's interest and his chatty narrative posture, we
don't expect--and do not get--revolutionary reconstructions of
sports. We listen to an Every Fan, concerned about sports, a career
amateur, as world traveler, an educated figure with an immense range of
experience who recognizes the essential element of sports to the
functioning of American culture. His warnings, however, never assume the
apocalyptic--they are gentle, his wisdom unprepossessing, his irony
understated. Ferguson is pretty sure--but not churlishly whiny about
it--that American sports has lost its innocence and that, regretfully,
next to go will be the old-style joy of competing, the special
camaraderie of those who take up the earnest work of play. With a kind
of Andy Rooney-ish nostalgic voiceover, Ferguson tackles with Old School
politesse such pressing concerns in an editorial voice that inevitably
seems nuanced with an unforced British accent--he explodes with a
forceful "Baloney" at one point, calls games
"tussles," athletes "blokes," and recalls being a
"lad." Sports, Ferguson reasons, has always been about what is
best in the American character: integrity, commitment, teamwork, and
heart.
That sensibility Ferguson shares with another of the Greatest
Generation, Maine lawyer and journalist (and former caddy) John Turner.
Turner's narrative takes such a premise and conforms it to a
narrative, specifically the gradual recovery of a promising golfer, Tom
Jenson, who, in the Depression heyday of golf, captured the imagination
of his Maine neighbors by winning a thrilling state high school
championship just months before accepting service in the South Pacific
theater where, by a grim irony, he is wounded trying to save the same
kid he beat in the golf championship. When the friend dies and Jensen
returns wounded and unable to compete any longer, he slips away from the
spotlight and lives the modest grandeur: a happy marriage and a loving
son, a promising golfer who himself, cruelly enough, dies in Vietnam.
The gods clearly have had fun with Tom Jensen.
The story of Jenson is revealed to us only gradually as Jenson, now
in his mid-70s, mysteriously shows up one spring day at a local
community golf course. The owner is sufficiently intrigued by the
mysterious codger who shows glints of talent that he gets a local
journalist to investigate the man. As the golf course owner comes to
befriend the old master, Jenson meets the owner's son, an uneven
golfing talent, who comes to distill from his friendship with Jenson the
secret art of addressing and ultimately mastering the golf course. True,
Turner tends to give Jensen advice that smacks of dialogue from The
Karate Kid and, true, too much of Jensen's tragic backstory must be
revealed in interminable stretches of dialogue that come to stretch
credibility--that said, here is a glowing narrative that moves with
steady believability to a heart-warming close that affirms how sports
triumphs most dramatically when it touches the hearts and souls of those
who play it. Sports finally gives us metaphors for handling the
heartbreaking difficulties each of us endures off the field of play. The
insights into golf, the Zen-like conversations about negotiating the
earth itself, willing the ball to follow its path, and the splendid
rollicking architecture of a rolling ball negotiating a manicured green
are emphatic, on point, and readable.
The wisdom here--as with Ferguson--is Old School and modest; the
prose--as with Ferguson--accessible and reader friendly; and the
impact--as with Ferguson--rewarding and lingering. Here are two books
that understand a kind of sport, a kind of competition, that is rapidly
retreating from the American consciousness as sports now is driven by
the market, by self-interest, and by narrow biases. Here are two gentle,
generous narrators of American sport.
Matthew Walker
English Graduate Program
Slippery Rock University (PA)
