“Gods do not answer letters,” Updike wrote.
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to read about the baseball great Ted Williams without bumping into John Updike’s famous line describing Williams’ notorious aloofness, most dramatically in evidence when he hit a home run in the final at bat of his career and then refused to acknowledge an ovation. It’s hard to look at The Sun Also Rises in 2013 without finding the descriptions of boxing and bullfighting very strained, often embarrassingly so, with their creaky symbolism and dubious grandiosity. Still, writers go there at their peril, because myth-making is not easy. Much fuss has been made in recent years about the rise of nonfiction and its power over the popular imagination-but when it comes to sport, the lure of myth remains strong. The events of a game and the constraints of its rules become raw materials for allegory. There’s a long tradition of writing about sport that tries to be more than writing about sport.
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