My Favorite Sports Book (and Christmas Present)

This should not be confused with my favorite birthday present, a mandolin, which I got when I was 20. No, the three-volume set, Great Stories from the World of Sport, edited by Peter Schwed and Hubert Warren Wind, was a Christmas present I got when I was 13. Difficult as it may have been to surpass the new bike I got for Christmas the year before, the sports collection managed to do it-it was that good, and I really got a lot of enjoyable use out of the bicycle.

The set came out in 1958. It consisted of three hard-cover volumes. Simon and Schuster published it. The volumes were not only numbered, I, II and III, they featured covers in three different colors: blue for Volume I, red for Volume II and green for Volume III. Each volume is between 300 and 400 pages long.

Also, each volume features one or two short novels at the beginning, while the rest are short stories or excerpts from longer works. Taken as a whole, the set covers just about the entire gamut of sport, as it was known in 1958, including such activities as hunting (not of any interest to me) and dog racing (but, mercifully, no dog fighting).

Of course, the major sports get the bulk of the ink. If you were to pursue the entire work in order, the first thing you would come across would be a novel I recently reviewed: Bang the Drum Slowly. It still remains my favorite sports story. And, on top of that, in this set, you get so many more well-crafted works, from such excellent authors as William Faulkner (The Bear), Ring Lardner (Horseshoes and the wonderful Alibi Ike), Arthur Conan Doyle (Silver Blaze), Jack London (A Piece of Steak), James Thurber (You Could Look it Up) and Earnest Hemmingway (Fifty Grand).

In addition, you will find very absorbing pieces by authors you may not have known about. Among them are Brooklyns Lose (a baseball story by William Heuman); The Zealots of Cranston Tech (a zany tale of basketball by Archie Oldham, which exceeds even the excellent basketball piece, El Capitan (published 4/20/10 on AC), by an even more obscure writer named T. Cleveland Lane) and, speaking of zany stories, a wonderful novelette called Rackety-Rax by Joel Sayre. That story is the improbable, but not entirely implausible tale of what can happen when organized crime collides with college football. Were it not for the presence of the aforementioned Mark Harris novel, Sayre's story would be the best long piece in the anthology.

And then there is P.G. Wodehouse. He is one of only three authors to be represented twice in this collection. Both of his stories are about golf, which he wrote about extensively, but not exclusively. Absent from this set is his very droll baseball story, The Pitcher and the Plutocrat. Of his two golf stories, the one in the blue volume is OK, but the one in the red volume, The Clicking of Cuthbert, was flat-out, drop-the-book-while-you-gasp-for-air hilarious. I would have considered it a great Christmas present if my parents had given me only this story, rather than the entire anthology.

As you might have come to suspect, a collection of sports stories from 1958, sometime before the glaciers retreated, is out of print. The most obvious place to find a set would be on Amazon.com, where, as of this writing, they have six used copies available from 75¢ to $30. Even at the high-end price, the collection is a steal. If you have a general interest in sport at all, I suggest you polish up your burglary tools and start stealing.

Sources

Great Stories from the World of Sport, Schwed & Wind, ed.

Amazon.com