Football's Best Short Stories

In sports literature, particularly in the fiction division, golf and baseball have hogged the limelight for so long that other sports seem lost in the shadows. At best, football's literature must be second string, right? Wrong. As Football's Best Short Stories makes clear, good storytelling is good storytelling regardless of the uniform it wears. As a collection, it's apt to blindside you with its range and the all-American razzle-dazzle of its prose.

Consider the depth chart: John Updike, Grantland Rice, Frank Deford, Irwin Shaw, Damon Runyon, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ellery Queen, Don DeLillo, and plenty more to back them up. Runyon's "Hold 'Em Yale" and Shaw's "The Eighty-Yard Run" are probably the best-known entries, but nobody listed here fumbles. Boyle's "56-0" is a wonderful paean to the struggles of the underdog. Mary Robison's "Coach" explores the character of a harried coach in search of a win. Deford's "Sooper Dooper" makes rollicking fun of the nation's single most over-hyped sporting event. And Queen's "Trojan Horse" solves a mystery at the Rose Bowl. In the oldest story in the collection, 1909's "The Freshman Full-Back," Frank D. Paine writes poignantly--maybe too poignantly for contemporary tastes--about fathers and sons; it stands as fascinating counterpoint to Michael Chabon's roisterous send-up of the same theme in "The Harris Fetko Story," the collection's most recently penned tale.

Each narrative is introduced with a paragraph of context and biographical data on the writer; Staudohar, in his kickoff to the volume, does a nice job of putting football's literature into perspective. If the game's idea is straightforward, implicit in its objective, he notes, "is breaking away from personal obstacles in order to achieve liberation by crossing the goal." Good stories need nothing more. --Jeff Silverman