Top Five Sports for Writers

The aesthetic attractions of sports have long been mined by writers, from Euripides to David Foster Wallace, not just for their own pleasure but as an allegory of life and the pursuit of beauty. Writers love the milieu of the sports world, the glamor, the daring, the sensual, raw physicality, as well as the over-the-top, ripe-for-satire celebrity worship and corruption. The rise and fall arc of competitive athletes' careers, determined by the same factors of destiny that shadow the grandest heroes of myth, offers inspiration and entertainment.

But which sports do you go to watch, or even practice? Charles Bukowski famously took up an interest in thoroughbred racing because his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, had already cornered the market on bullfighting. Are there new sports that might be good, skateboarding, for instance, where you might make a mark? Sure, if that's your bent, go for it. But perhaps the classic sports for writers offer the greatest literary bang for the buck, so to speak. With the profusion of spectacle that marks late stage capitalist sports entertainment offerings, here are five sports, some classic, some new, where a writer can be guaranteed to catch a dose of the real thing -- the constant variety...the human drama...the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat!

5. Climbing. The world of mountaineering has long held an attraction for the literary elite, for whom escape to the mountains signified the pursuit of some purer realm, a world of heights and mysticism only allowed to the initiated. The sport has taken a decidedly more democratic turn in the last several years with the advent of rock climbing walls and bouldering gymnasiums popping up in urban centers for practitioners to hone their craft year round. The International Olympic Committee even decided to make climbing an official Olympic sport in 2016, with competition divided into three segments, lead climbing, bouldering, and speed climbing. This is a fun sport to try out, where you can conquer your fear of heights and gain muscle tone for your geek allure at the same time. Some books on climbing to whet your interest:
Solo Faces (1979) – James Salter.  Based on the life of  Gary Hemming, an American climber  who daringly rescued two stranded German climbers on the Aguille de Dru in France, 1966.
Eiger Dreams (1990) – Jon Krakauer. A collection of short stories where Krakauer describes what it takes to climb the hardest mountains.
The Lonely Victory (1979) – Peter Habeler. An account of the  first 'alpine style' summit of Everest, without the aid of supplemental oxygen, which everyone considered impossible.

4. Mixed Martial Arts - You can debate which is the true inheritor of the blood sport mantle. I used to be a fan of the fight game a la Marquis de Queensbury, grew up watching Frazier and Ali in the Thrilla in Manila from the black and white television in our kitchen in Caracas and Mano de Piedra Duran ruling the welterweight ranks in those years with unmatched daring and aplomb. But for me the organic appeal, the garish brutality of the octagon has outranked the infighting and corruption of the old fight game of the WBA or WBF, even given the lack of true star power in MMA, with the exception of Notorious Conor McGregor, the Dublin plumber's apprentice making his comeback bout tonight vs. Cowboy Cerrone. It's not for everyone, but for me, being ringside is one of sport's true thrills, even in an ironic age of all marketing all the time. I wish I could be in Las Vegas tonight. But it's the little moments that a writer lives for, the details that bring it to life. When McGregor dedicated the fight to his mother, there were tears in his eyes. You can't hide from that. A couple of books I can recommend:
On Boxing (2006) -  Joyce Carol Oates. Ms. Oates describes the courage of fighters vulnerable to the primal fear of being hurt in the ring.
A Fighter's Heart (2008) - Sam Sheridan. The author does a great job describing the early world of mixed martial arts in various exotic locales from an insider's perspective. Gets to the heart of the appeal of the warrior life.

3. Distance Running - I'm thinking of the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, a short story by Allan Sillitoe, which I read one summer thinking it would motivate me to train harder for my cross country season. It had very little to do with running, but it was a great read about the culture of working class Britain, which at the time was a great escape from my attenuated existence as a child of expatriate, divorced Americans, spending the summer vacation from boarding school in a spare room of my mother's Roosevelt Island walk-up apartment. Anyway, running is a discipline which has unwittingly provided me with habits of work and mind that have been great for my writing. Also, I love the overall hedgehog-like wisdom that rules all distance foot race strategy, stay in the game, in striking distance despite all odds, and give it your best shot at the end. That's all there is, everything else is guesswork, from which brand of shoes to what kind of stretches.
Allan Sillitoe: New and Collected Stories (2003)


2. The Races - I'm talking the horse track here. I had a friend, we used to go together to El Hipodromo, which was the race track just outside Caracas, don't know if it's still there, when we were about thirteen. We'd take a couple of buses from his house, studying the racing forms with all the details on the horses and the jockeys, and then we'd watch the races and sometimes go up to the window and place bets, competing to see who could win. He was much better than me because he had been studying the scene for a couple of years. I could see how it could be addicting, but I wasn't that enamored of the actual physical presence of the horses themselves and after I went away to prep school and his family got transferred back to New Jersey we lost touch. I don't think I've been back to a race track since. I got back in touch with him a few years ago, and it turns out he owns a couple of studs now and goes up to Saratoga a couple of times a year to watch them race. I promised I'd meet up with him there. That will be fun. To see him and maybe to try the horse track scene again and write a story perhaps. I like horses all right. But I think a true devotee, someone like Bukowski, who once said “all I know is that I believe in the sound of music and the running of a horse. All else is squabble,” just loves to be around the animals, gets a sense that he or she can imbibe some of their power through some magical transference just by focusing and thinking well of them as they round the track, barreling up chunks of turf with their driving, sharp hooves, and the little jockeys riding them like little insects perched on their knees.

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983) - Charles Bukowski
A Moveable Feast (1964) - Ernest Hemingway

1. Memory Competitions - This is a new entry in the sports competitions beloved by writers, but given the obvious affinity for mental gymnastics and the allure of photographic recall that these champions possess, it has shot up the ranks to the number one spot in record time. Actually, we are not dealing with photographic recall. There is some dispute as to if that even exists. But these are athletes of memory who train according to well-established methodologies in order to carry out flat out crazy feats of memory that they face off over in wild public battles. The best known of these being, of course, the World Memory Championships. I forget where the last one was, thank God for Google. Zhuhai in Guangdong Province, China, it turns out. While I'm on Google, let me just lift this from the Wikipedia article, yes:

The World Championships consist of ten different disciplines, where the competitors have to memorize as much as they can in a period of time:

1. One hour numbers (23712892....)
2. 5-minute numbers
3. Spoken numbers, read out one per second
4. 30-minute binary digits (011100110001001....)
5. One hour playing cards (as many decks of cards as possible)
6. 15-minute random lists of words (house, playing, orphan, encyclopedia....)
7. 15-minute names and faces
8. 5-minute historic dates (fictional events and historic years)
9. 15-minute abstract images (WMSC, black and white randomly generated spots) / 5-minute random images (IAM, concrete images)
10. Speed cards - Always the last discipline. Memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible.

Get out of here. That's crazy. These people are good.
Moonwalking With Einstein (2011) - Joshua Foerr
Remembrance of Things Past (1913) - Marcel Proust

Anthony Caplan is the author of the science fiction series The Jonah Trilogy and the contemporary family drama Yet Today, with a publication date of May 5, 2020.