More Than a Game: Sports Literature for Young Adults (review)

In his recent study, More Than a Game, Chris Crowe remarks on the chronic lack of respect afforded to literature featuring sports prominently. Likewise, he laments the general lack of respect for young adult (YA) literature. Thus, his survey, subtitled Sports Literature for Young Adults, takes on a double challenge of championing books that are "doubly damned" (2). Crowe's book meets that challenge, making a strong case for the need and worth of these books. Crowe is a good inductive thinker, ably discerning patterns and trends in the field and sorting titles into usefully delineated subgenres. Intended primarily for teachers and librarians, this work directs readers to the very best in young adult sports books.

In the years between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the next, a period documented in Crowe's fascinating history chapter, a template for young adult sports books was set in place. The typical sports book of the era was a novel that went something like this: a white boy (like Frank Merriwell or Chip Hilton), with the help of a kindly mentor figure (an oldish white man) is able to rise up from mediocrity in his chosen sport (usually baseball but certainly one of the "Big Three") to achieve success on the field or court, culminating in a home run, touchdown, or basket that wins the championship. Crowe seeks to pull the rivets out of this boilerplate, paying special attention to books that deviate from this formula in any way.

Most of us naturally think of novels when we hear the phrase "sports book for young adults." But Crowe notes that "nonfiction books easily outnumber novels" (47) generally, and, especially with the raft of sports biographies (he lists seven on Tiger Woods alone), the YA sports field reflects a similar ratio. A full chapter reinforces the idea that novels are not the only worthwhile YA sports literature. Crowe includes nearly four pages on short fiction, citing several anthologies and lauding collections by Gary Soto and Chris Crutcher. Sports poetry surfaced in 1744 ("Base-Ball"), again in 1888 ("Mighty Casey at the Bat"), and has reappeared in a surprising number of contemporary anthologies, collections and verse novels. Excellent non-fiction abounds, including Madeleine Blais's highly regarded account of a girls' basketball season, In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995).

As Blais's work demonstrates, the heroes of these books can be heroines. Crowe has observed a time-delay, however, in that sports fiction focusing on women has lagged behind the real-world advances brought on by Title IX: though today 41.5% of all high school athletes are girls, as recently as 1991 sports books for boys still outnumbered those for girls by a six to one ratio. Crowe offers some speculation to account for the discrepancy, mulling the influence of sexism among readers and publishers, but presenting also the more interesting theory that "young women have not accepted the male sports paradigm" (66), that most women "don't want to be given a grade, . . . a stat sheet" (Danziger qtd. in Crowe 66). Hence, the style and content of current YA sports novels are perhaps not congenial to the worldview of young women readers, which is less "bottom-line" oriented than that of young men.

A similar departure from the formulaic early sports books is that minority athletes, especially African Americans, are increasingly represented in YA sports fiction. Crowe acknowledges the considerable contribution of Walter Dean Myers, but is especially lavish in his praise of Bruce Brooks's Newbery-award-winning The Moves Make the Man (1984). Still, the ratio of featured African Americans in fiction is not commensurate with the dominance of black athletes in the upper echelons of football, basketball, boxing, and track, especially as reflected by the number of black athletes appearing in the sports biographies.

Crowe does not categorize books by "race," either in his main text or in the appendices, but perhaps he is too insistent on...