If Hemingway Had Been a High Jumper

As I was plodding along Commonwealth Ave last night, I started wondering why there were no great works of literature about track and field. Oh I know, there's Alan Stilltoe's "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner," and John Updike's "Rabbit, Run." But are those really great literature? I know everyone reads John L. Parker's "Once A Runner," but with all due respect, it's not Pulitzer prize material. So where are the great novels, the epic or epigrammatic poems, the classic plays?

Of course the reason there are no great novels, poems, and plays about track and field is that the immortal authors were too busy writing to spend their time training and competing. But what if, somehow, writers could fit two passions into one mind -- follow track and field and also fill the world with timeless prose or verse? If they could, we might have works of great literature like these...

If Hemingway Had Been a High Jumper...

Weary with life and disillusioned with the endless and seemingly futile attempt to keep jumping higher and higher on his bad leg, Jake Barnes embodies the spiritual wanderings of the Lost Generation in the classic novel "The Bar Also Rises," which ends with this famous exchange between Jake and Brett:

"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have set such damned good PRs together."
"Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

(Later in his career, Hemingway would chronicle his failed attempt to master the throwing events in "A Farewell to Arms.")


If Shakespeare Had Been A Sprinter...

In one of his most rolicking comedies, Shakespeare takes us to Padua, where Petruchio takes on the seemingly impossible task of coaching the talented but high-strung and tempermental Katharina in "The Timing of the Shrew."


If Norman Mailer had been a H.S. Coach...

Mailer questions authority in his powerful first novel, "The Naked and the Disqualified," in which we follow a team of ill-disciplined track athletes who constantly run afoul of the MIAA's uniform regulations.


If William Golding Had Run the Relays...

When all the sprinters on the team are left on their own to determine which four will run in the 4x100 relay, the runners revert to primitive, even violent behaviors in "The Lord of the Fly Zone."

"Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise baton..."


If Robert Frost had been a distance runner...

If Frost had been a distance runner, he might have turned to this experience as he explored the timeless themes of personal struggle and redemption, of loneliness and the search for meaning in the face of an often hostile world. One can only imagine how long runs in the country would have colored "The Hilly 10-Mile Road Less Traveled," and how schoolchildren would memorize the haunting last lines of his most famous poem, "Stopping by the Track on a Snowy Evening:"

The whirlpool's lovely, warm and deep,
But I've a training log to keep
And miles to run and then repeat
And miles to run and then repeat