The Game’s the Thing | This Season’s Winners

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Storytellers venturing into the mines of Metaphor frequently fill their literary hoppers with Sports to enhance the thematic underpinnings of their tales. There is probably no richer ore. Not even Heroic Fantasy—though generally played for higher stakes and offering a comparably glittering variety of challenges, situations, and opportunities—can match it for direct, everyday parallels with the actual lives and experiences of readers. After all, who hasn’t (for better or worse), at least tried out some athletic activity at one age or another? Better writers exploit these parallels, and, rather than just shoehorning occasional references to some organized sport into tales that actually have an entirely different focus, deliver cogent insights into how the game (and, by extension, life) is, has been, or should be played. Here are some of this past year’s more memorable high scorers in the genre.

Though neither invented in this country nor, by many measures, our most popular sport (anymore), baseball occupies uniquely important niches in our nation’s history and psyche. Matt Tavares’s picture-book biography There Goes Ted Williams, the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived (Candlewick, 2012; Gr 1-4) profiles a complex American hero whose ego and ability to hold a grudge were matched only by seemingly superhuman talent and an indomitable will to excel both on the field and in wartime military service. Readers who don’t understand how high racial and religious barriers to many chosen careers used to be will be both educated and inspired by Chris Crowe’s Just As Good: How Larry Doby Changed America’s Game, illustrated by Mike Benny (Candlewick, 2012; Gr 1-3). The book makes a case for regarding the second African American to play in the modern Major Leagues as much a hero and a groundbreaking star as Jackie Robinson was, as well as Shelley Sommer’s Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg, Baseball Pioneer (Calkins Creek, 2011; Gr 4-6), about one of the greatest sluggers of all time and our country’s first Jewish sports superstar.

Students of baseball history will be enlightened by John Thorn’s account of the sport’s earliest days in First Pitch: How Baseball Began (Beach Ball Books, 2011; Gr 5-9), and entertained by Audrey Vernick’s Brothers at Bat, illustrated by Steven Salerno (Clarion Books, 2012; Gr 1-3), the true story of an all-sibling semiprofessional team. Students of the game itself will be delighted by the droll verse and art in Douglas Florian’s Poem Runs: Baseball Poems and Paintings (Houghton Harcourt, 2012; Gr 1-3), and the decidedly peculiar experiences of young Alex, who finds himself playing on the Oz Cyclones against other teams of literary characters in Alan Gratz’s Fantasy Baseball (Dial, 2011; Gr 4-7). Young gamers will identify with a Little Leaguer’s fear of standing at the plate after he’s beaned by a pitch in Michael Northrop’s Plunked (Scholastic, 2012; Gr 4-6) and the struggles of a teenage slugger to adapt to his team’s change from metal to wooden bats in M.G. Higgins’s all-baseball-all-the-time Power Hitter (Lerner, 2012; Gr 4-8, with hi/lo appeal)…not to mention the efforts of a very talented cow to make her dreams come true in Robert Kinerk’s Clorinda Plays Baseball!, illustrated by Steven Kellogg (S & S, 2012; PreS-Gr 2).

Football, the other contender for the title of America’s Game, anchors a lighthearted account of the renowned blooper commemorated in Dan Gutman’s The Day Roy Riegels Ran the Wrong Way, illustrated by Kerry Talbott (Bloomsbury, 2011; Gr 1-3), and pro defensive end turned novelist Tim Green’s Deep Zone (HarperCollins, 2011; Gr 4-7), in which gifted young players from the author’s previous tales go head-to-head in a suspenseful gridiron contest before a national audience.

Suggesting that football isn’t just a game for guys, sports journalist Mike Lupica chronicles the struggles of a team with a female kicker to stay together in a rapidly shrinking Pennsylvania small town in The Underdogs (Philomel, 2011; Gr 4-7), and in Miranda Kenneally’s Catching Jordan (Sourcebooks Fire, 2011; Gr 8 Up) a star quarterback on a team contending for a Tennessee state title battles distractions—such as conflicting feelings about her (yes, her) hunky new teammate’s ball skills.

The other “football,” also known (in English-speaking countries at least) as soccer, takes Center Circle on the pitch in Carol Nevius’s rhymed Soccer Hour (Marshall Cavendish, 2011; Gr K-2), illustrated with photorealistic acrylic and color pencil scenes of children practicing and playing by Bill Thomson, and in Sarah Aronson’s Beyond Lucky (Dial, 2011; Gr 4-8), in which a young goalie is rewarded for spectacular play but forced to make some tough choices when his best friend is implicated in the disappearance of his lucky playing card.

On a different scale of tough, 14-year-old Deo’s love of soccer leads to hard-fought contests and first steps to emotional recovery after a massacre drives him from his home village in Zimbabwe to a refugee camp in South Africa in Michael Williams’s Now is the Time for Running (Little Brown, 2011; Gr 7 Up). Trevor Kew’s Breakaway (Lorimer, 2012; Gr 5-7) features both soccer and hockey action, as Adam’s delight in excelling at the latter sport begins to fade as his interest in the former rises despite his father’s displeasure, and other obstacles.

And speaking of ball skills, younger fans will whoop at the hoops prowess on display when herbivores square off against carnivores in Lisa Wheeler’s Dino-Basketball, illustrated by Barry Gott (Carolrhoda, 2011; PreS-Gr 2), while in Greg R. Fishbone’s hilarious Galaxy Games: The Challengers (Lee & Low, 2011; Gr 5-7) the place of all humanity in interstellar society comes down to a game of 21 between 11-year-old Tyler Sato and a massive but talented alien made of stone.

Older readers will be drawn into the powerful—sometimes agonizing—personal and moral issues driving the experiences of a high school point guard in Matthew Quick’s Boy 21 (Little Brown, 2012, Gr 10-12) when both a more talented rival and violence to a loved one come crashing into his life. Equal parts character study and fast-break b-ball action, Paul Volponi’s The Final Four (Viking, 2012; Gr 7 Up) frames explorations of the distinctive characters, backgrounds, and expectations of two pairs of players on opposing squads within an unforgettably tense and exciting NCAA play-off contest.

The skills and challenges at the heart of fighting sports make up central elements in Ying Chang Compestine’s Crouching Tiger, illustrated by Yan Nascimbene (Candlewick, 2011; Gr K-2), a tale of a frustrated child who finds the martial arts’ true foundation in the discipline and slow movements of his grandfather’s tai chi, and also John “Red” Shea & Michael Harmon’s gritty, semi-autobiographical A Kid from Southie (WestSide, 2011; Gr 8 Up), about an amateur boxer with anger issues who becomes a mob “enforcer.”

Though other themes and issues are folded in, it’s the riveting details of fencing technique and strategy that turn Joseph Lunievicz’s Open Wounds (WestSide, 2011; Gr 6-10) into an unusually compelling read. Colorful, sometimes tongue-in-cheek views of the not-always-as-violent-as-it-seems sport of professional wrestling animate 11-year-old Max’s close-up encounter with his Lucha Libre idol in Xavier Garza’s bilingual Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011; Gr 6-9), and Ray Villareal’s Body Slammed! (Piñata Books, 2012; Gr 5-7), in which young Jesse finds himself pulled in different directions by his hard working celebrity father, who plays the masked “Angel of Death,” and an up-and-coming wrestler with a taste for fast living.

Track and field triumphs climax Jane Barclay’s tale of a small boy with outsized dreams, Jojo the Giant (Tundra Books, 2012, Gr 1-2), illustrated by Esperança Melo, and Relay Race Breakdown (Stone Arch Books, 2012, Gr 2-3), by Thomas Kingsley Troupe (as “Jake Maddox,” a collective pseudonym) and illustrated by Eduardo Garcia—the story of a reluctant member of a relay team who ends up a winner even though he doesn’t cross the finish line first in the big race. Older readers will be drawn into James Riordan’s Blood Runner (Frances Lincoln, 2012; Gr 6-8), a harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story, about a boy orphaned in a South African massacre who grows up to be an Olympic marathoner.

Interest in the Olympics never really disappears, but the upcoming Summer Games in London will certainly spark a fresh wave. John Feinstein’s Rush for the Gold (Knopf, May 2012; Gr 5-8) artfully catches that wave with a suspenseful tale featuring a young reporter, his best friend—a World Champion swimmer competing on Team U.S.A.—and high-level chicanery that takes place, in part, at those future Games. Olympic dreams drive four focused young women in the new “Go-For-Gold Gymnasts” series, written by gold medalist Dominique Moceanu and Alicia Thompson. The first episode, Winning the Team (Hyperion/Disney, 2012; Gr 5-7), features Brittany, a talented but sharp-tongued newcomer to the group whose narrative offers a blend of personal issues (from making and alienating friends to an eating disorder) with technical talk about gymnastics practice and techniques.

For children too young to remember what all the hoopla is about, Brad Herzog’s alphabetic survey of past Olympic events and high spots, G is for Gold Medal (Sleeping Bear, 2011; Gr 2-4), illustrated by Doug Bowles will fill in some of the historical background, and both Deloris Jordan’s Dream Big: Michael Jordan and the Pursuit of Olympic Gold (S & S, 2012; Gr 1-3), illustrated by Barry Root and Ann Malaspina’s Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper (Albert Whitman, 2011; Gr 1-3), illustrated by Eric Velasquez, provide inspirational profiles of athletes who made significant marks at the Games.

The modern Olympics’ organizer, Pierre de Coubertin, established “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) as an official motto for the Games but the sentiment has wider applicability because the words in Latin are not adjectives, but adverbs—promoting and valuing not competition but effort, not beating others but playing (working, living) to the best of one’s ability. Fictional or otherwise, most of the athletes in these stories learn that lesson, and perhaps readers will, too.

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For an in-depth look at nine sports titles, and information on the standards addressed, extension activities, and related websites, read Sharon Grover and Lizette Hannegan’s “Score!: Lessons On and Off the Playing Field.”

This article originally appeared in School Library Journal’s enewsletter Curriculum Connections. Subscribe here.

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