Sport and LIterature

I have been thinking for a while now about the lack of good writing about sport in Australia, and because of my own personal interest, football in particular.

I don't mean sports reporting, or opinion, but the bigger picture stuff, the literary stuff that has a shelf life of longer than 24 hours.

Melbourne is meant be a city of literature and books or some such, yet in the currently occurring Melbourne Writers festival there was only one event that discussed sport, and it was a comedy debate. Don’t get me wrong, it was an enjoyable event, but why don’t Melbourne writers take football more seriously (or less seriously) as an area of consideration?

This has coincided with me reading an article about Jews and baseball in America.* The author offers a litany of authors, books, plays, and songs written by Jews about baseball, but remarks upon how few have become elite players, and the generational struggle that played out over baseball - the second generation trying to assert their ‘americanness’ with the game.

The author argues that it was partly because they were immigrants that they wrote about the game. It was through trying to understand the nation that they came to write about their own experiences as a new citizen and that led to experience with sport and baseball.

So why is the same not true of Australian writers and football? Are we not allowing migrants to Australia to write? Are we not allowing them to experience football? If not migrants, why haven’t other authors spent more time thinking about the influence of football on culture in Melbourne?

Not surprisingly I don’t have the answer to these questions. All I know is, I would certainly like to read more literary writing about football, because I am pretty sure it would be a worthwhile field of endeavour.



* the article was Eric Solomon, “Jews and Baseball: A Cultural Love Story” in Eisen and Wiggins (eds.) Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture, Greenwoon press, Westport Connecticut, 1994