It seems like only yesterday that I was spending my summers playing in softball leagues, soccer leagues, and basketball leagues, or running in five mile road races.
But two decades ago I was single, childless, and debt-free. My participation in competitive athletics stopped six months after our first son was born in 2001. In addition, I now look 30 (and feel 40) years older than I did 20 years ago.
Today the void I filled with sports in the 1980's has been replaced by the satisfaction I derive from reading. However, finding the time to do so can be tricky when your daily responsibilities include watching a first grader, a preschooler, and a toddler, as mine did during the school vacation just passed. However, thanks to judicious time management and occasional shoddy parenting I managed to compile a decent reading list this summer.
Forty Million Dollar Slaves is a treatise on African-American participation in professional and major college athletics. It was skillfully researched and written by William C. Rhoden, an award winning writer for the New York Times. I'd recommend it to any thoughtful person interested in sports, American history, or both.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a much-admired professor at Colby College, as she was prior to undergoing gender-reassignment surgery, when she was James Boylan. Her book, I She's not There: A Life in Two Genders, provides a fascinating account of what it's like to be a woman inside a man's body, and is written by one of the relatively few individuals who has significant life experience as both a male and as a female.
Ernest J. Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men is a fictional account of a group of elderly African Americans who all confess to the murder of a cruel and unpleasant white neighbor in rural Louisiana. Although it was published in 1983 and set nearly half a century before that, the bravery and pride shown under stress by the elderly gents is still inspiring today.
Powder Burn, a novel by Carl Hiaasen and the late Bill Montalbano, is about an innocent bystander caught up in a brutal drug war in south Florida. I also read The Franchise, an account of life behind the scenes of a fictional National Football League team of the early 1980's. It was written by former NFL tight end Pete Gent. Before recommending it to a friend though, be forewarned: there is even more blood spilled in his book than there is in Hiaasen's.
After all that violence I switched gears and read The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde. It pokes fun at some quirky social climbers of the late Victorian Era. Although it was first performed in 1895, Wilde's play provides further evidence that then as now, it's fun to laugh at self-absorbed types who are more concerned with who they appear to be than who it is they actually are.
I also devoured two excellent sports-related biographies, Pistol, by Mark Kriegel, and Clemente, by David Maraniss. Each provides a fascinating look at a remarkable professional athlete of my childhood. Pistol Pete Maravich was a stunningly creative basketball player, Roberto Clemente a gifted baseball star. Neither was a child of privilege, each possessed talents he worked long and hard to refine, and both died young. Each biography was long on thoughtful detail and refreshingly short of glitz. It was nice to transport myself, however briefly, back to a day when sports were more about actual competition than generating revenue for television and countless other corporate partners, as is the case today.
In addition I perused a few books related to courses I'll be teaching at Kennebunk High School this fall, and regularly read several local periodicals (including this one) on a regular basis.
As I devoured all those printed words I couldn't help but recall Estelle Anderson. She may not have been interested in sports, crime novels, Oscar Wilde plays, or the plight of the transgendered. However, without Miss Anderson I'd never have been able to explore any of those subjects with the enthusiasm I did this summer. She was my first grade teacher, and with the able support of my parents and other caring adults she taught me to read. To this day I've never been given a more useful or meaningful present.
If there is anything more exciting than having the opportunity to impact a group of young people the way that Miss Anderson influenced me, I have yet to discover it. Teaching young people the potential significance of reading (and its partner, writing) is equal parts energizing and vital.
It's also the best way I know to belatedly repay Estelle Anderson, who gave me and countless other people the most important gift any of us will ever receive. October 7, 2007 Edited August 28, 2008
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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