Editor’s Corner
July 24, 2009
Recognizing the Stranger
By
Andrea Pitzer
Brazilian author Paulo Coelho has claimed that only two narratives exist in storytelling. The first is a “voyage of discovery,” and the second is “a stranger comes to town.” ESPN writer Tom Friend’s “The Disposable Superstar” makes for rewarding reading in part because it merges Coelho’s two concepts: a young man makes a voyage of discovery and returns to his hometown transformed—if not quite a stranger—to take on a new role.
Because the playing field is so far removed from the daily grind, athletics can carry these universal themes gracefully, taking seemingly irrelevant actions and freighting them with significance. Even when spectators are not witnessing the culture-changing brilliance of Jesse Owens, Billie Jean King, or Tiger Woods, we make our way through football, soccer, basketball, and baseball seasons the way we read stories whose endings we might guess but can’t rush.
But sports stories don’t require a professional arena to move the reader, as Tom Lake proves in “The Way It Should Be,” a piece from June’s Sports Illustrated on a college women’s softball game. Following a moving example of not only honor in defeat on the field, but honorable actions that hasten defeat, Lake follows a curious narrative arc. He opens by threatening repeatedly to make readers weep—and then delivers.
As with writer George Plimpton’s suicidal dabbling in professional athletics and Lance Armstrong’s triumph over cancer, we find ourselves more profoundly attached to the competitor who has taken it in the teeth once or twice. Stories like these from Tom Friend and Tom Lake succeed in part because they help make athletes appear both more and less like strangers: fully human, yet capable of achievements we can only imagine.