Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday September 8, 2010
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BIGGER THAN THE GAME: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the '80s Created the Modern Athlete
Michael Weinreb
Gotham
ISBN 978-1-592-40559-6
338 pages
$26
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
This is a book about the emergence of "the modern age of American sports," but Michael Weinreb begins it by insisting that "everything goes back to a young man fashioning tall tales of athletic glory." He was Ronald Wilson Reagan, who as just about everyone knows began his extraordinary career in the 1930s as a radio broadcaster for station WHO in Des Moines, doing play-by-play accounts of baseball and football games "he could witness only in his own mind." He was fed sketchy information about the games by telegraph wire and made up the details on his own, and he "would later say that those four years at WHO, immersed in the mythology of American sports, were some of the most pleasant of his entire life."
For the rest of that life Reagan saw sport through a rose-tinted haze because of that experience, so it is no small irony that sport took on new and diametrically different dimensions when he was in the White House. It was a period when the country's view of itself underwent considerable change in large measure due to his own influence. Weinreb writes:
"He swept into office (in 1981) on an agenda of optimism, promising to cut taxes and to liberate the marketplace from excessive regulation, from the undue burdens of a government and the pervasive sense of pessimism that had, in the previous decades, proved a drag on the American dream. He was the first president to embrace the imagery of television, utilizing his gifts as an actor, modulating his voice and his expression to match the gravity of the moment, harnessing the power of the medium. And yet his visage hearkened back to the America of Frank Merriwell and Dizzy Dean, to the days when sports were a simple pastime, to a time when a lone voice emanating from a radio could carry across the farms and plains of the Midwest."
Of course it was not Reagan but John F. Kennedy who was "the first president to embrace the imagery of television," but since Weinreb was a mere eight years old when the Reagan years began he can, perhaps, be forgiven for his apparent belief that this is when history itself began. In any case, his larger point, though he belabors it to wretched excess, has some validity: It was during the Reagan years, with their passionate embrace of a sentimental and nostalgic view of the American past, that American sport broke away from its past and entered a new era of "unrepentant" individualism in which team spirit and fair play counted far less than the "celebrity persona" of the individual athlete and in which big money became the be-all and end-all.
To illustrate this change, Weinreb explores the stories of four athletes whom he regards as emblematic of the times: Jim McMahon, the quarterback of the Chicago Bears who became "the representative of the American id, the Ambassador of Arrogance"; Bo Jackson, the preternaturally gifted multi-sport star who, "in an era of spiritual materialism ... had not allowed money to cloud his judgment"; Brian Bosworth, the linebacker for the University of Oklahoma who, notwithstanding his outlandish hairdo and behavior, "was an unrepentant capitalist, an opportunist seeking out stardom"; and Len Bias, the brilliant basketball player for the University of Maryland who died of an overdose of cocaine one day after signing a fat contract with the Boston Celtics, in the process becoming "a totem for all the excesses and social injustices of the 1980s."
These case histories are not quite so cut and dried as Weinreb believes them to be, but each, in its own way, points to the emphasis on "opportunism and self-reliance" rather than collective achievement that became pervasive during the 1980s, the echoes of which certainly are still felt today. Sport was big at the decade's beginning but huge by the time it ended. Just before the decade began, a tiny cable television operation that called itself Entertainment and Sports Programming Network "beamed itself to two million potential viewers from a half-finished studio in a little Connecticut town: by decade's end ESPN was well on the way to becoming the giant of sports broadcasting, a money machine of unprecedented dimensions. By the same token in 1984 "a revolutionary new basketball shoe" was introduced by a little-known company called Nike; soon thereafter the company signed a rookie pro basketball player to a contract, and ... you know the rest.
I would argue that more than any of the four players at the center of Weinreb's story, it was Jordan who became the decade's emblematic athlete, embodying as he did individual brilliance, championship play and ruthless commercial exploitation. It may be true of Jim McMahon that "his overarching philosophy of human existence was that he really didn't give a damn what anyone thought," of Bo Jackson that he was showtime personified, of Brian Bosworth that he "was perhaps the most self-aware of all these media creations sprouting up in locker rooms across America" and of Len Bias that he was both a prime example of the exploitation of athletes (especially black ones) by big-time universities and a poster boy for the rising drug culture -- all of this probably is true to one degree or another, but collectively they are an exaggeration of reality.
The biggest and most important change in American sports during the 1980s was not the emergence of a few outlandish personalities -- there have been those before and since, from Dizzy Dean and Jimmy Piersall to Barry Bonds and Chad Ochocinco -- but the rise of the big-money culture. Though sports money had gotten significant by the end of the 1970s, it was greatly eclipsed in the years that followed not merely by the sums themselves but by the cynicism with which they were amassed by players, owners, agents and everyone involved in the system. The salaries paid to professional athletes became so inflated that it's difficult to see how ordinary fans managed to identify with them, but somehow they did. Far worse was the descent of big-time college athletics into a cesspool of greed and exploitation.
James Bias, Len's father, hit it on the head: "M-o-n-e-y. That's what it's all about. It's all about making money for the university. It's not about athletes. It's not about athletes and how you feel about them." This subject has been far more comprehensively covered, though, in two books by Murray Sperber -- "College Sports, Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. the University" (1990), and "Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education" (2001) -- which, judging by his bibliography and notes, Weinreb has not read. That's too bad, for familiarity with Sperber's extensive examination of the corruption of college athletics would have strengthened Weinreb's discussion of the subject.
In general if not in all specifics, though, Weinreb's points are well taken. Blaming it all on Ronald Reagan is a stretch, to put it mildly, but he played a large role in encouraging the development of a culture that happily rewards people who are splashy, self-assertive and self-aggrandizing. But just don't think in terms of a few flamboyant jocks whose mouths are bigger than their talents. Think Hollywood. Think Wall Street. Think just about anything you like, because it's all around us.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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FREEDOM
Jonathan Franzen
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978 0 374 15846 0
562 pages
$28
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
So what is it about Jonathan Franzen and poo? In 2001, his wonderful breakthrough novel, "The Corrections," was momentarily stunk up by a scene in which a senile old man imagines his feces talking back to him. A decade later, Franzen's more staid, more mature, but all around less exciting "Freedom" reaches its comic zenith when a young man searches through his own excrement with a fork. What seemed like a sophomoric indulgence in that earlier tour de force now smells stale.
Which is one of the problems with "Freedom." We've read this story before in "The Corrections," back when it was witty, when its satire of contemporary family, business and politics sounded brash and fresh, when its revival of social realism was so boisterous that it ripped the hinges off the doors of American literature. The most anticipated, heralded novel of this year gives us a similarly toxic stew of domestic life, but Franzen's wit has mostly boiled away, leaving a bitter sludge of dysfunction.
Cannily, the slyest part comes up front: a 23-page preface that outlines the rise and fall of Walter and Patty Berglund's marriage in St. Paul, Minn. (You may have read this section last year in the New Yorker.) "Walter's most salient quality, besides his love of Patty, was his niceness," Franzen writes, while Patty was "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee ... famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else." It's classic Franzen, a smart, acidic take on suburban life and particularly green yuppies, "the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege."
This finely fanged tale of neighborly spite and camouflaged jealousy lets you relish your own superiority -- if you don't recoil at the narrator's smugness, which is perhaps what always separates Franzen's fans from his detractors. (Paradoxically, the New York Times critic whom Franzen called "the stupidest person" in the city thinks "Freedom" is a limning, lapidary masterpiece.)
But even readers won over, as I was, by the opening summary of the Berglunds' collapse will be flummoxed by the novel's next section: a long reminiscence supposedly written by depressed, alcoholic Patty at the suggestion of her therapist. She describes her crippling adolescence with her caustic father and unavailable mother, and then her messy relationship with the two men who will dominate the rest of her life: the "miraculously worthy" Walter, whom she eventually marries, and his best friend, Richard Katz, a rakish musician who disdains popular acclaim the way a certain National Book Award-winning writer once sneered at Oprah's praise.
All of this -- Patty's college basketball career, her abusive friends, her ricocheting attraction to Walter and Richard -- is analyzed with the microscopic attention of a determined autopsy. It's often odd enough to justify such scrutiny, but there's no way to believe that this acerbic, incisive voice belongs to Patty, as opposed to, say, Jonathan Franzen. The obvious falseness of that pose, which we're repeatedly reminded of, is fatally distracting.
When Franzen drops the Patty mask around page 200, we can finally enjoy his exquisite sentences without reservation. Love him or hate him -- the critical extremism he inspires demands that everybody pick a side -- you've got to admit he's an extraordinary stylist, America's best answer to Martin Amis. In dialogue that conveys each palpitation of the heart, every wince of the conscience, and especially in those elegantly extended phrases of narration, Franzen conveys his psychological acuity in a fugue of erudition, pathos and irony that is simply fantastic.
But how many readers, even the long-suffering readers of literary fiction, will settle for linguistic brilliance as sufficient compensation for what is sometimes a misanthropic slog? What else does "Freedom" offer as it churns over the detritus of one middle-class family?
Unfortunately, the novel doesn't offer its themes so much as bully us into accepting them with knife-to-the-throat insistence. The word "freedom," for example, beats through the book frequently enough for a frat-house drinking game. As the characters attain the freedom they craved -- from children, from spouses, from work -- they inevitably discover that it's unsatisfying and self-destructive, which is the same puritanical sermon that Amis pounded away on earlier this year in his cerebral sex farce, "The Pregnant Widow."
One of the reasons liberty is so fleeting, Franzen argues, is that our relations are characterized by Darwinian competition. Again and again, we hear that Richard and Walter are competing for Patty, that Patty and Walter's assistant are competing for Walter, that Patty and her sisters are competing for their parents, that Walter and Patty are competing for their son's affections. It's a bleak, relentlessly cynical view of human nature acted out by self-loathing men worshipped by female doormats. (Where are all these pretty women who plead, "You don't have to love me ... I can just love you"? Give me names!)
The overdetermined competition between these characters is reflected by the novel's overarching concern with environmental destruction, the lopsided contest between the animal kingdom and humanity's ever-growing population. That alarm becomes Walter's rallying cry as he tries to manage a shady partnership involving a West Virginia coal mining company and a vast nature preserve.
It's the kind of complex, contemporary issue that Franzen can trace with precision, catching the ironies and moral compromises that take place in boardrooms and bedrooms, administrative offices and country hallows, the great knot of economic and political machinations that somehow entangles the fate of an endangered warbler with the manufacture of military hardware. And it's nicely laced with wry, up-to-the minute commentary on social media, alternative music and youth activism.
But far too often, Franzen uses Walter's environmental work to arrest the story, turn toward the audience and hector us about the loss of wildlife, particularly the extinction of songbirds. In the unlikely event that some strip-mining, ocean-dumping, panda-hunting rube stumbles onto this novel, he'll get his comeuppance for sure, but everybody else will probably use these cranky public service announcements as a chance to stretch their legs. Same for the book's worn-out satire of Republicans and the Iraq war, which hangs on the wholly unbelievable involvement of Walter's son with a corrupt Halliburtonesque corporation. Oddly discordant with the story's sophistication, these corny bits are like watching Dick Cheney shoot fish in the face in a barrel.
But stop with the complaints! The point to remember is that "Freedom" is big enough and thoughtful enough to engage and irritate an enormous number of readers, even those who couldn't care less (guilty!) that Franzen -- along with a pelican, the pope and a black pug -- has appeared on the cover of Time magazine this summer. As the sprawling epic winds down, it recasts the opening comedy of suburban conflict in a new neighborhood carved out of Walter's precious forest. Decades have passed by now; Walter and Patty's children have grown up and moved away; affections have been crushed. But Franzen allows a twilight of peace and redemption that's lovely, almost magical. One more thing for us to argue about in this brilliant, maddening novel.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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