Some people think sports and literature don’t mix. Those people are wrong. What could be a better subject for a novel than intensity, obsession and strife? What are books for other than taking the reader into another world, another culture, with its own rules, language and hierarchies?
These novels, comics and memoirs are united in their intensity, physicality and thoughtfulness, giving a unique peak into a hyper-specific subculture, be it the worlds of horse-racing, basketball, snooker or competitive swimming.
Swimming Studies, by Leanne Shapton
Those who know Leanne Shapton’s work will probably know her through her art, and probably won’t know (unless you’ve already read the book) that growing up in Canada she was one of the best swimmers in the country, making it all the way to Olympic trials. Swimming Studies is about this experience, but it’s also a springboard (sorry) that launches the reader into unexpected places, confounding preconceived ideas of what swimming is in a way that’s super personal and yet expansive.
And like all the best books about a hyper-specific subject-matter, it manages to be a book for both enthusiasts, as well as readers with little-to-no prior knowledge (like me). This is in part because through the magic, concentrated focus that all good books have. That it makes you obsessed with swimming, art-making, ritual and obsession itself while between the pages (and likely far beyond). But it’s also because of its fluid formal brilliance: the way the different memories layer on top of each other to create a rich, full, immersive feeling; the sections that feel like an art installation of paintings, catalogues of swim suits, visual interpretation of very specific smells; and how all these things come together to create a book that doesn’t feel fractured but instead smooth and indivisible.
Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel
On a plot level, Headshot follows seven head-to-head boxing matches at The Daughters of America Cup in Reno, Nevada, with the novel’s chapters structured by the tournament brackets: starting with eight teen girl boxers and whittling them down knockout-style to a final champion over the course of two days.
But what makes this book go from a “huh, I never knew that about the teen girl boxing world” style experience to truly a transcendent work of fiction is the authorial voice, which hovers over the eight girls in a detached third person, diving into their pasts, their present, their eventual fate, their ticks, their fighting styles, the way they carry themselves, their rich and fraught internal worlds. Through the frame of the boxing match, each girl is thrown into relief against the other leaving their psychologies thoroughly plumbed. In retrospect, the setting is a work of genius. In their mid-to-late teens these girls are at a defining moment in their personalities, and throwing them head-to-head in a high pressure boxing match just adds fuel to that emotional fire.
Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlon
Sometimes in our reading journey the most valuable thing you can do is step into the life of someone you never even considered. That’s exactly what I thought when I approached this unusual but deeply profound novel from Kathryn Scanlan – meticulously and seamlessly woven together and reassembled from a series of conversations between the author and horse trainer named Sonia, who becomes our trusted guide in the arcane and physical world of her work. Hoof care, training regimes, equine health: it’s all in there, it all sounds prosaic, but it will become in your mind as sacred as it is to our narrator.
We are with Sonia right at the side of the racetrack in beautifully concise chapters that form a portrait of a life lived in service to something larger. Lines that seem slapdash and spat out contain sometimes unbearable, barely-disguised heartache. Reading those lines twice is often irresistible. Effortless to devour and gently enveloping with its dawn groomings, the bleak landscapes and travelling circus of the horseracing circuit makes for surprisingly propulsive storytelling, and though there are moments of bleakness, the ultimate effect is to be transported into that elusive other life.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
Following on from Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, The Secret to Superhuman Strength continues Alison’s biographical comics a couple of decades in the future with a radically different theme (exercise, sport, the body, cycling, hiking) but with the same philosophical and literary depth that she employs in her previous books. The theme is more of a uniting force and a honing device that binds everything together through the relationship between all kinds of obsession and extremes and enlightenment- plus deep analysis of the transcendentalists and the Beat Poets and their place in the history of queerness.
Bechdel is rightly considered a total genius by anyone with a brain. And just FYI you don’t need to have read her previous work to enjoy this!
The Wrestler, by John Kenn Mortensen
If you want nightmares, John Kenn Mortensen (“JKM” to those in the know) is your guy. You may know him as co-author of Storysmith Deepcut The Christmas Bestiary, the most horrifying Yuletide book imaginable. The Wrestler is his graphic novel debut: a super short fable about an ageing alcoholic wrestler named Sledgehammer, who may or may not have made a deal with Satan himself in exchange for invincibility in the ring.
The Racket, by Connor Niland
On the surface, this is a conventional sports memoir, a career retrospective that details the triumphs and humbling failures of an athlete through their ascent, peak and retirement periods. But The Racket is joyously different in one crucial way: it’s a story told from the middle, not from the top. Connor Niland never cracked the top 100 tennis players, never won a grand slam, and suffered a bout of food poisoning during the biggest match of his career (against Novak Djokovic, live on TV).
We’re so used to seeing the world of professional tennis from the vertiginous perspectives of those who dominate the sport, but Niland’s knack for anecdotes is bolstered by his commitment to honesty about the less glamorous – and often quite terrible – circumstances of being in the game’s exhausting middle echelons. For every chance encounter with a tennis legend, there’s a debilitating injury or a career-threatening dearth of funding, lending this book a fundamentally relatable rhythm of real life, not the version we hear from the winners.
Pocket Money, by Gordon Burn
For our money, this is the absolute urtext of unconventional sports books: a true slice of several extraordinary lives, told in Burn’s signature searching prose, with a unique understanding of the balance between glamour and grubbiness. Shadowing the generation of snooker players who ushered in the game’s mid-80s heyday, Burn eavesdrops on the deals and conflicts that arrive with sudden and hitherto-unconscionable amounts of money, and accompanies the likes of Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis as they hoover up cash in overseas exhibition tournaments and goofily appear in the music video for Chas & Dave’s ‘Snooker Loopy’. It’s a document from another time, obviously, but the insight is bulletproof.
There’s Always This Year, by Hanif Abdurraqib
Subtitled ‘On Basketball and Ascension’, this saintly and poetic meditation on the delightfully obscure yet pivotal figures of college basketball in Abdurraqib’s native Columbus, Ohio, and the ways in which their ability to jump extremely high and throw balls extremely accurately goes beyond the merely physical. Taking his subjects and turning them almost into sacred figures, weaving their stories with his own upbringing and the wider ways in which we deify our sports heroes, from their ostentatious sneakers to their unassailable prowess on the court. Knowledge of basketball is absolutely not required, there’s enough pure warmth and wisdom to carry any reader through.