My Recent Morning Show Appearance

 I had a great time chatting about Thorpe on VIRGINIA THIS MORNING in Richmond, Virginia. Hosts Greg McQuade and Cheryl Miller were fun to talk to. They had each read the book, liked it a lot, wanted me to sign their copies, and asked great questions.

Couldn't Hit A Curve Ball

Jim Thorpe, 1916 NY Giants

 
"He couldn't hit a curve ball." So said John McGraw, Jim's domineering and pennant-winning manager at the New York Giants baseball team. The judgment stuck, clinging to Jim's story and reputation like a sharp old barnacle.

Jim came to the Manhattan team in the wake of one of the biggest sports scandals of the century (The 2011 World Almanac, almost 100 years after the fact, still puts it at the top of the list of worst sports scandals): Seven months after winning, with huge margins, both the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, and playing a 1912 football season for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School team that would have won him, Sports Illustrated would later suggest, the Heisman Trophy had it existed back then, Jim was summarily stripped by the AAU of his two gold medals and his amateur status. 

Why? He had played professional baseball with minor league teams in 1909 and 1910. So? "Simon pure" amateurism was the sports ideal of an elite determined to exclude, in effect, the lower classes. Anyone who had ever accepted payment of any kind for playing sports was deemed a pariah and demoted to the grubby rank of professional.

Pre-Babe Ruth, the Giants were the Yankees of their day. Jim accepted McGraw's lucrative offer in January 1913. Baseball was his weakest sport, but that didn't matter. He was a huge gate attraction.

You can read in detail about the fraught McGraw - Jim relationship in NATIVE AMERICAN SON. What is important here is that Jim had to learn to play baseball, the sport that can frustrate even the finest athletes in other sports.

By the summer of 1919, sold by McGraw to the Boston Braves because "he couldn't hit a curve ball," Jim was the leading batter of the National League. At one point that summer, he was hitting better (.375) than Ty Cobb in the American League (.350). He could now hit anything, from left- (.333) and right-handed (.316) pitchers.

An injury took him out of the running in August, but for the rest of his life he would say of that 1919 season, when he batted .327: "I must have hit a few curves."

Bye Bye Old Year, Hello New

 

Well, that was 2010. 

The last night of it was spent at a party at the neighbor's house down the road here in rural Virginia. The clock was set two hours back so that we could celebrate midnight at 10 p.m. (the tradition started when the children in the group were small; now they're in high school, but we still do it.) Stouffer's lasagne cooking away in the oven. Tons of corn chips. A sausage dip in the slow cooker that, we all agreed, looked bad but tasted good. Cheap red wine. Beer.

This year I went to the Dollar Store and bought out their selection of Mardi Gras-style beads. Everybody, even the dogs, got slung with green, red, and blue strands. The cats were upstairs, as usual, under the beds.

The day before, the few other nearby neighbors, who are either not invited or choose, always, not to come, are warned that there will be fireworks at 10 on New Year's Eve. "The cheesiest fireworks display ever," as it's fondly called, by us, anyway. The guys are really into the fireworks and look forward to them all year. The usual supplier was sick, so a new source had to be found -- a process meticulously recounted to a rapt audience of us. 

A scaffold is set up in the road (it's a cul de sac) with Roman candles, sparklers, tubes, mines, shells -- the works -- lined up in a row on the wooden platform. One year the Roman candles got out of hand and the men had to run for cover -- the incident now a beloved part of our oral history. The women and children gather several feet away, ready to scream with feigned fear and real delight as the crackles, pops, and sizzles begin and the men jump around waving their barbecue lighters.

Last night the sky was crystal clear -- Orion is big right now -- and the air not too cold. At the stroke of "midnight," the first round of firecrackers was lighted. Wow! Ooooh! Wow, again! Yay! Then, like big professional fireworks, just when we spectators thought it was all over, came the grande finale. OMG! Fabulous.

Welcome, 2011.

Signing Books, Getting in the Christmas Spirit

Me at Books and Company, Lexington, VA 12-19-10

What is more Christmassy for a writer than hanging out days before December 25 in a cool small-town independent bookstore, signing your own book? Not much. Surrounded by happy, laughing book-people shopping local by buying books? Perfect.

You can't help but think of all those years of getting books for Christmas: now people are giving your book to friends and family. It warms the heart, just as reading A Christmas Carol does, every year, without fail.  

You, the author, are now part of that great chain of holiday book giving, going back to Gutenberg (well, maybe starting a few years after his printing press; it took awhile, after all, for non-manuscript books to catch on, not to mention literacy). Going back, anyway, to when you were ten and a favorite aunt gave you a leather-bound copy of Little Women for Christmas and you never looked back.

This Christmas, 2010, at the end of months of Gutenberg-like revolutions in the book business, I couldn't help but think, as I signed my book near home this week in Lexington and Richmond, that all the indies I came across in my recent book tour, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., might not only survive but thrive once the New Book Order comes to pass. 

Independent booksellers have made it this far and now nobody knows what's coming next in the book business -- except that the race may go to the small and the nimble. Social marketing is changing the game by the day. Independent booksellers are getting a cut of e-book sales. Their superb customer service and ambiance are winning hearts and minds. A passionate reaction is emerging, insisting that the bound book shall not disappear. 

Anthony Powell, the English author of the 12-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, wrote that books do furnish a room. Let's expand on that and say that bound books do furnish a life.

So, while we still have them and hope we always will: God bless us -- writers, publishers, editors, booksellers, book buyers -- every one. 

A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

Aren't all such lists subjective? 

So why not make such a list totally subjective: "I chose these books because they were written by my friends (and me)." You have a problem with that?

It's hard enough getting a slice of media attention. Let's all pitch in and spin our friends, the people we can vouch for as hard workers, brilliant thinkers, and consummate professionals.  

As we come to the end of yet another challenging year, I offer these 2010 books as worthy of your attention and wallet. Buy and read any and all of them. You will be glad you did. 

A Totally Subjective List of the Best Books of 2010

A Writer's Heaven

Me reading from Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe at the launch of the Marmauke Writing Factory, Pleasantville, NY, Dec. 15, 2010. 

Spending several years writing non-fiction narrative is kind of like being a spy. No one knows where you are for weeks at a time. You float from archive to archive, a parasite sucking information from sources (archivists) deeply undercover in the bowels of historical societies and Special Collections in places like Canton, Oklahoma City, Cooperstown, and downtown Los Angeles. If you're into it, it's irresistible.

You have to have the instincts -- and passion -- of a sleuth. Or a bloodhound, nose to the ground, following the scent to the source. 

Then you have to write up into persuasive narrative written form all the information you've found. Hole up in an office somewhere -- like upstairs in your home -- and turn straw into gold. It's lonely, or at least other people tell you it must be. You aren't aware of feeling that way. If you were, you'd be doing something else with your life. However, when you start feeling agoraphobic, it's time to reach out.

Which is where a writers group comes in. I've been in such a group before. We met every week at a wonderfully welcoming restaurant in Chappaqua, NY (Le Jardin du Roi - great lobster salad) and read our stuff, shared war stories. But recently this idea got taken to a whole 'nother level. In September the Marmaduke Writing Factory Marmaduke was formed in Pleasantville, NY, just east of Chappaqua in Westchester County. Not only is there a group of about 10 writers, there is a designated space -- a craggy, rocky, edgy basement cave -- for established authors to go and write, think, and help each other. 

It's warm (there's a gas fire), there are desks, tables, armchairs, and copies of all our books on shelves to distract us. Very cozy and reassuring to literary spies coming in out of the cold of lonely endeavor.

My Favorite Sports Books

 

I just wrote a sports book -- well, it's a history book, too -- so people assume I've read sports books all my life and know all about them. I don't. 

Up until about age 22 I hadn't read much of anything published before 1900. I was the only one in my high school honors English class in California to read and really like Tom Jones (1749). I lived in my own private time machine filled with afternoon tea, crumpets, crazy Russians, dissolute French people, and Anglo-Irish aristos hanging on to eccentric elegance in crumbling Georgian mansions beyond the Pale. Sports? That was what my father, brothers, sister, uncles, cousins did. That was time away from reading. Time spent out of the time machine, blinking in the bright sunshine of the present.

At some point my brother Buck turned me on to sports books. Buck is the natural athlete of an athletic family. We like to say he could ski beautifully on two-by-fours. Buck has the instinct for a good story. He also haunts the mailbox every week, waiting for Sports Illustrated to arrive. The family often hides it, just to see his reaction: "Anybody seen the new SI?" "Gee, no, Dad." Buck told me about Stolen Season (see below) and that started it all. I liked the immediacy of sports stories, their apparent simplicity. But of course, behind the game, the life, there was so much more. A good sports book was like a transparent three-dimensional structure (cubic tic tac toe?) that you played as you read. Dynamic.

So, below are 1) my idiosyncratic list of my favorite sports books; and 2) Sports Illustrated's Dick Friedman's gaming of the system of putting sports books into such lists. Add in your favorites. Tell me what I haven't read and should! And, thanks, Dick!

1) My Turn at Bat: The Story of My Life (Fireside Sports Classics) by Ted Williams
2)

The Enlightened Bracketologist

books.google.com

"Introducing the ingenious, addictive tool for judging everything under the sun: ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGY, the new science that makes opinion a sport." And Dick Friedman has applied it to sports books. Click on THE ENLIGHTENED BRACKETOLOGIST title above and be sure to turn the page to see which book Dick ended up with as The Best (it wasn't on my list, but I'm going to read it right now).