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Reviewed by:
  • Sporting Lives: Metaphor and Myth in American Sports Autobiographies
  • Aram Goudsouzian
Sporting Lives: Metaphor and Myth in American Sports Autobiographies. By James W. Pipkin. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press. 2008.

In his memoir Second Wind, the basketball legend Bill Russell describes an occasional moment of transcendence, a magic spreading over the court as ten players float in perfect rhythm. "We'd all levitate," he writes (85). The game seemed less physical than spiritual. These sublime flights eclipse any concern over winning and losing—they create arenas of self-expression, paths to self-knowledge. As James W. Pipkin explores in Sporting Lives, such descriptions reveal how athletes construct identity. He describes the themes, metaphors, and narrative techniques that govern a wide span of sports autobiographies.

Pipkin first examines sports as an "echoing green," a space of eternal childhood. "All I ever wanted was to play baseball forever," wrote Willie Mays, a.k.a. the "Say Hey Kid" (27). As they embrace the pure ideal of sport for its own sake, athletes describe acceding to the authority of paternalistic coaches. They live in a pure Eden, insulated from the harsh world. This passivity has its cost. As illustrated by challenges to the sports establishment such as Jim Bouton's Ball Four, such myths may keep athletes self-centered, self-destructive, and self-unaware.

Pipkin next considers "body songs," or understandings of oneself by understanding one's body. "At their best, athletes speak with their bodies: the word is made flesh," he writes (57). Athletes maintain a child's sense of physical vitality into adulthood, and many describe feelings of freedom, power, and limitless possibilities. Yet athletes read their bodies as not only subjects, but also objects. They employ the metaphor of a fine-tuned machine, or they describe playing through excruciating pain. These paradoxes create particular tensions for women and black athletes, who may be particularly sensitive to objectification. Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King endure stigmas as mannish [End Page 177] freaks; Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar resent characterizations as big black monsters.

Sport offers a particular freedom. It creates opportunities for creativity, clarity, and out-of-body awareness—the "magic" described by Bill Russell. Yet Pipkin shows that when playing careers end, the athletes describe a loss of youth, an alienation from the body, and a disconcerting lack of structure. Though some appreciate the freedoms inherent in leaving the sports cocoon, others describe a metaphorical death.

Pipkin concludes by interpreting the four (!) autobiographies of Dennis Rodman as the embodiment of postmodern celebrity. Rodman's image contains multitudes: masculine and feminine, heterosexual stud and gay icon, self-made hero and subversive rebel, workmanlike rebounder and cross-dressing celebrity. Rodman presents himself in fluid terms, packaging himself as a commodity, his sense of self understood only through appeals to a consumer audience.

Those seeking a historical understanding of the sports memoir may wish Pipkin offered more case studies like the Rodman chapter. His text-driven analysis can obscure the motives of the individual authors, the evolution of the sports and book industries, and the political ramifications of the athletes' self-presentations. Sporting Lives nevertheless describes themes that pervade autobiographies across the twentieth century, and these insights will benefit all scholars of sport.

Aram Goudsouzian
University of Memphis
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