The Too-Often Untapped Literary Potential of Sport

It was the Sunday of March 3rd when I watched my fantasy dismantle before my eyes: Elizabeth Kitley, our All-American and now three-time winner of the ACC Player of the Year award, was on the ground injured. What had been a 10-game winning streak eerily similar to last year’s run culminating in a Final Four appearance was broken right there in the last regular season game. I’m not too ashamed to admit there were tears in my eyes, as were in the eyes of coach Kenny Brooks lamenting in his post-game press conference that he doesn’t like Kitley going on fast breaks, that he usually would have called a time-out, and that he should’ve in that moment, too. Hindsight is pretty 20/20, but maybe even this saying is just a last-ditch attempt to exert control on the random happenings of life that we can never fully anticipate.

What does this all have to do with literary fiction? Are sports matters like these only relevant if you are a fanatic jock with a little too much love for the game? Or does sport encompass the full range of life’s rich qualities that are worth examining through literary fiction?

Literary fiction is somewhat hazy to define. As someone drawn to literary fiction more than any other permutation of literature, I think it is best characterized by its greater focus on character and theme than plot. Moreover, it is a category of writing rather than a genre. Any genre of fiction can be contained in it, including the genre of sports fiction. As Micheal Woodson puts it in a Writer’s Digest article, “Literary fiction can be any genre and should be for the masses, because at the heart of every work of literary fiction is the human experience.”

A notable work of literary fiction featuring sports that has been on my reading list for quite some time now is Panenka by Rónán Hession. This novel tells the story of Joseph, a character whose penalty kick miss in a critical soccer game finds him bearing the weight of his community’s disappointment for as long as decades after. At 50 years old, he is still ironically nicknamed Panenka, a crafty penalty kick technique, and lacks vulnerable connections with his family or anyone else. Quite realistically, this novel deals with conflict in sport that can manifest more broadly in one’s life, a misery that only spreads if not treated with earnest enough reflection. Yet, Western society loves to erect binaries anywhere and everywhere, say, between the nerds and the jocks, oversimplifying people and their needs through siphoning them into arbitrary categories. Condemned to operate within these categories, crosstalk gets lost, and life’s full scope of tools becomes out of reach for everyone unless they dare wander outside of their category and risk not being taken seriously. Literary fiction is a prominent example of one of these tools often left out of reach.

Now, let’s bring it back to Elizabeth Kitley’s injury. Was I tearing up because the team's winning prowess was depreciated? (We were stomped 53-82 by the No. 4 seed Notre Dame in the ACC tournament semifinal without Kitley playing, despite being the No. 1 seed). No, not quite. I was tearing up because I remembered the feeling of having something so leftfield and out of my control insert itself into my reality with such finality, the long recovery filled with physical pain, estrangement from loved ones, and identity loss unfurling mercilessly before me. I still grapple with my own injury today in many facets of my life beyond sport, yet feel that my biased association of sport with triviality courtesy of thinking in binaries has largely hindered my healing process overall. Being an athlete and being a writer felt irreconcilable to me since middle school, for example. Sport thus commanded my attention until the injury left me with the need to forge some new understandings. I realized I did not have to stake everything on one category of being, and that, in fact, my life experiences and interests could intersect in rich and compelling ways if I let them.

To me, literary fiction is where I grapple with my most shameful and puzzling experiences of life. Those pertaining to sports need such outlets as well. Hession’s Panenka makes it clear what the consequences of unexamined pain can be when someone cannot muster up the courage to be vulnerable with them. The next novel I read will be Panenka because although I have used insights from non-sports literary fiction to interrogate my struggles as an athlete, I know that immersing myself directly into the fictional world of sports will be a powerful place for my ideas to play in. People who aren’t athletes would benefit greatly as well, for literary fiction is as potent a tool for exploring the tribulations of experiences vastly different from your own as it is for self-exploration.

So, even if you know nothing about the tragedy that befell Elizabeth Kitley on that Sunday night of March 3rd, digging into some literary fiction about sport would leave you with much to ponder. And if you are an athlete reading this blog and thus likely to have at least dabbled in some literary fiction, I implore you to write more of your stories, for they have a lot to say about you as both an athlete and a person in this world.