Reading list (submissions welcome!)

As this is about as much holiday as I have coming up I am allowing myself a slight break this week on the ol' sports-faith-muckraking beat.  Rather than a full-fledged blog entry, I'm working on the blog in a different way.

While real-life events virtually never seem to leave me short of material, I also want to open up an exploration of relatively recent literature on sports, which may open up avenues of thought on the intersection I'm trying to patrol.  Thanks to some newly-recieved gift cards I'm loading up the ol' e-reader (nook, not Kindle) with some future reading on the subject (in addition to one hardcover received for Christmas as well).

First I'll mention two books already underway:

Sexton, John, with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz.  Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game.  New York: Gotham, 2013.

Upon first seeing this title a few weeks ago I was rather suspicious.  Baseball geek that I am, I'm not a big fan of the more mystical, mumbo-jumbo-ish literature on the sport.  Still, I decided I needed to take a look.  So far (I'm three "innings" in -- apparently there is a Constitutional stipulation that any book or movie or series on baseball must be divided into "innings" instead of chapters or scenes) the volume (which derives from a seminar the author, president and professor at NYU, teaches on this same theme) manages to steer clear of such indulgences, although barely at times.  Decidedly interfaith in scope, the book includes anecdotes and illustrations from the history of baseball, both well-known and more personal in the author's experience, and interweaves meditations on such themes as faith and doubt, "conversion" (leaving one's team behind, or having it leave you behind), miracles, blessings and curses, and other -- not a few of those sound familiar enough to a baseball fan or a theologian, for sure.  For now it seems to be a book that can be read as deeply or as simply as one chooses; it can be a full-fledged meditation on how baseball and its impulses might become a starting point for a more overtly metaphysical journey, or it can be rendered as a simple set of sermon illustrations if one so chooses.  More, I'm sure, when the book is completed.

Fainaru-Wada, Mark, and Steve Fainaru.  League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle For Truth.  New York: Crown Archetype, 2013.

Accompanied by the PBS documentary of the same title and filling in many of the gaps necessarily left behind in the brief scope of one broadcast, this book (by the author of Game of Shadows, the most successful exposé of baseball's steroid era so far) lays waste to the NFL's claims of ignorance at the effect of concussions and day-to-day head trauma on its players.  It also exposes the creepy turns of those emerging organizations looking to engage in research on the brains of former players, and doesn't flinch from describing in awful detail the degeneration of those lives affected by CTE.  A hard read.  I'm close to three-quarters done.

Still to come:

Pomerantz, Gary M.  Their Life's Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

No, I'm not a Steelers fan, nor have I ever been.  But the Steelers, particularly the 1970s dynasty, have the unfortunate distinction of being at the epicenter of the earthquake rattling the NFL, with figures like Mike Webster and Terry Long numbering among the first publicly identified figures to be associated with the CTE diagnosis in the game.

Benedict, Jeff, and Armen Keteyian.  The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football.  New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Purports to be a look at the ugliness of the college football business, and where all the money goes.

Jackson, Nate.  Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile.  New York: Harper, 2013.

From the point of view of a former player, not a star, one who took HGH in an attempt to prolong his career, but apparently had enough forethought to seek out ways to spare his brain any further punishment during his career, among other things.


So there's gotta be more, right?  Football can't be the only sport needing consideration, can it?  So, if you've got any suggestions for books that invite further consideration please send them on.  I'm not interested in gloppy homilies about the glory of this or that sport, the first one on the list notwithstanding.  The warts can't be avoided if I'm going to get anywhere in this mission to understand where the business of sports collides with the honest pursuit of faithful justice.