JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Thirteen

JRN 573 - Sports Literature
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Spring 2015/ Week Thirteen

Week Thirteen - 1
● This week, we explore North Dallas Forty (1979), a film
based on the novel by Pete Gent, a former wide
receiver for the Dallas Cowboys.
● The final response paper of the semester is due at the
end of this week. Respond to the film as you would any
of the articles or book chapters we have.

Week Thirteen - 2
Pete Gent

Week Thirteen - 3
● The film is based on Gent’s 1973 novel, a fictionalized
reflection of his NFL career as a wide receiver with the
Dallas Cowboys from 1964 to 1968. He finished his
career with the New York Giants.
● Gent did not play college football at Michigan State, but
the Cowboys signed him anyway.

Week Thirteen - 4
● Gent’s best season occurred in 1966 when he caught
27 passes for 474 yards.
● Gent, who died in 2011, is best known for his novel that
emerged at a time when sports literature was
dramatically changing toward a more realistic portrayal
of athletes.

Week Thirteen - 5
● "It was a mordant black comedy at a time when
mordant black comedy could actually sell sports books,
and when a kind of coruscating and deeply adult
honesty was briefly in vogue,” wrote Jeff MacGregor in
an appreciation of Gent in 2011 as part of a longer
ESPN.com piece on sports literature.
● http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/story/_/page/macgregor-111003/football-mythology-wake-peter-gent-death-new-walter-payton-
book

Week Thirteen - 6
● "Like Dan Jenkins' 1972 novel "Semi-Tough," it
presented drugs and sex and racism and moral
absurdity and every variation of ethical and practical
corruption as being foundational to the game of
football. These books were very much in the mode of
other books in that long gone, bad haircut,
counterculture time,” wrote MacGregor.

Week Thirteen - 7
● From 1970 to 1974, a number of factual and fictional
books by former athletes revealed the true nature of
professional and college sports, changing sports lit.
● The trend started years earlier, in 1960, with pitcher Jim
Brosnan’s The Long Season.

Week Thirteen - 8
● The book “ … was a new kind of sportswriting —
candid, shrewd and highly literate, more interested in
presenting the day-to-day lives and the actual
personalities of the men who played the game than in
maintaining the fiction of ballplayers as all-American
heroes and role models,” the New York Times stated.
● http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/04/sports/baseball/jim-brosnan-a-pitcher-with-the-cardinals-and-reds-brought-new-
perspective-to-baseball-writing-dies-at-84.html

Week Thirteen - 9
● In 1970, Dave Meggyesy documented abuse in the NFL
his factual Out of Their League, a factual work about his
time as a pro.
● Jim Bouton’s factual Ball Four, also released in 1970,
likewise showed Major League Baseball to be brimming
with pathologies of all kinds.

Week Thirteen - 10
● Yet it was Gent’s book more than others that seemed to
infiltrate American culture outside of the general sports
fans, and the movie version had much to do with that
when released in 1979.
● That’s when pro football fully emerged in full as
America’s sport with enormous television ratings
underscoring its popularity as spectacle.

Week Thirteen - 11
• The book told the story of the North Dallas Bulls, a
fictionalized version of the Dallas Cowboys.
• The work featured characters who resembled players
such as quarterback Don Meredith and coaches such
as Dallas head coach Tom Landry.

Week Thirteen - 12
• “’North Dallas Forty’ was among the early books
providing unsettling views of pro sports that went
beyond the game details on the sports pages,” the New
York Times wrote in Gent’s obituary in 2011.
• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/sports/football/peter-gent-69-ex-player-who-wrote-north-dallas-forty-dies.html

Week Thirteen - 13
● The book effectively served as an indictment of the NFL
and its managerial elite, described through its
characters as mean-spirited and ruthless.
● The characters themselves can be interpreted as
reflecting the internal tension each displays between the
ritual sports hero and the popular sports hero.

Week Thirteen - 14
● The movie revealed these excesses and tensions in
cinematic fashion, featuring what former NFL player and
current football scholar Michael Oriard described as a
hyper realistic depiction of a tackle in a piece posted on
Deadspin after Gent died:

Week Thirteen - 15
● The tackle is “absolutely stunning, the most violent
tackle ever shown in a football film, and it has not
been surpassed. Fans at the time had never seen the
violence of football up so close. I played professional
football, but I was stunned by the violence of the
collision. It did not seem fake. It felt more real than
the reality I knew,” wrote Oriard.
• http://deadspin.com/5847792/the-impact-and-the-darkness-the-lasting-effect-of-peter-gents-north-dallas-forty

Week Thirteen - 16

Week Thirteen - 17
● Oriard did not think the movie was a classic, and he did
not applaud the somewhat contrived Hollywood-type
ending that seemed to undermine the rest of the movie.
● Yet it stands as something more than piece that only
reflects its historical period of the 1970s, Oriard
concludes:

Week Thirteen - 18
● "But the experience of playing professional football—
the pain and fear, but also the exhilaration-that is at
the heart of North Dallas Forty rings as true today, for
all the story's excesses, as it did in the 1970s. Peter
Gent knew them firsthand and translated them into
enduring art,” he wrote.

Week Thirteen - 19
● And that is the highest praise a writer can received for
any work: “enduring art.”

Week Thirteen - 20
● When we examine the scope of The New Yorker
articles and the film, we see clearly that sports writing
can be – indeed, must be – rooted in the wider meaning
of sport as a reflection of culture.
● Sport endures beyond statistics, which are abstractions
of performance. Literature reflects humanity.

Week Thirteen - 21
● Literary accounts whether factual or fictional accounts
transform the games and the players into works of art
when the truth is the object
● Gent knew that in his novel, and the film reflects that
internal sensibility from one who experienced it, as
Oriard points out.

JRN 573DE - Lecture: Week Thirteen

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