Roger Kahn - The Roger Kahn Reader: Six Decades of Sportswriting

Roger Kahn

I am not certain that there are hard-and-fast rules for collections, beyond the overriding and defining one: provide good reading.

Some editors believe that collections sell best when they have a single theme, say feminism, or Babe Ruth, or egg-white omelets. Among these monothematic enterprises is one with much better substance than title: Tennis and the Meaning of Life, edited by Jay Jennings. Here we encounter the formidable and seductive Joan Dunn in a lilting poem by the English laureate John Betjeman (190684). It is called A Subalterns Love Song.

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnishd and burnishd by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament: you against me!

Miss Dunn wins the set. She also ends up in the arms of the subaltern amid mushroomy, pinewoody, evergreen smells. That last excerpt takes us closer to the essence of life than does even the finest topspin lob. (But enough exposing the secrets of my game.)

All too frequently, single-topic anthologies simply run out of good writing on their single topic. Jules Tygiels Jackie Robinson Reader includes some wonderful stuff and some writing that is rather less than wonderful. There are not that many outstanding pieces on the man. Most of my own favorite collections are multithemed, reflecting the authors or editors varied interests. I particularly like Otto Friedrichs Grave of Alice B. Toklas: And Other Reports from the Past. Friedrich begins with his search for the burial site of Toklas, Gertrude Steins lover, who encouraged Friedrich when he was a young novelist. The gatekeeper at Pere-LaChaise cemetery in Paris has never heard of Toklas. He offers instead to guide Friedrich to the burial plot of Edith Piaf. Grave ranges from Wagners Parsifal to a memoir of Friedrichs friendship with the late James Baldwin. Id suggest, on behalf of the cause of varied themes, that a reader who doesnt care about Toklas, Parsifal, Jimmy Baldwin, or Otto Friedrich is all the poorer.

Another personal favorite is Eugene McCarthys No Fault Politics: Modern Presidents, the Press and Reformers. McCarthy had a gift of being serious and funny simultaneously, as when he wrote that the first President Bush did not even take responsibility for his running mate. He treated Dan Quayle as a kind of accident or an act of naturesomething found on the doorstep one morning.