About the Book
Willie Morris's collection of sports stories, Always Stand In Against The Curve, is a book for those of us lucky enough to have shot baskets under a driveway or shagged fly balls in open fields until it was too dark to see the hoop or the ball against the sky. In Morris's soulful point of view, sports is about growing up in America, radio broadcasts of the Brooklyn Dodgers in a Mississippi country store, girls with double names, practical jokes, small town coaches, the hold the past has on us, about running effortlessly in the sun. The novella, "The Fumble," is a sports classic about high school football in the Deep South. Set in the 1950s it describes a confrontation of mythic proportions between a small town football team from the "Delta" and the omnipotent Central High Tigers of Jackson, Mississippi. Each of the six autobiographical essays in this book form chapters of a Great American boyhood, beginning with Morris's farewells to high school and to American legion baseball, a road trip to Notre Dame with "Bevo," the University of Texas longhorn steer mascot, Rhodes scholars playing basketball in England, a writers-and-artists softball game in East Hampton, New York, in which the author admits he is too old to run the bases, and finally a journey back to Austin, Texas, in search of the past. To Willie Morris, sports are a gentle center in the eye of the storm, a clean world of instinct and action where one can work out the bruises of living, where the rituals of youth teach valuable lessons about winning and losing, about heroes and disillusionment, about finding a way to face the world.
About the Author :
Willie Morris was editor-in-chief of Harper's magazine from 1967 to 1971. He grew up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, attended the University of Texas and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. His books include Always Stand In Against the Curve, North Toward Home, Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood, Terrains of the Heart, The Courting of Marcus Dupree, Taps, James Jones: A Friendship, and New York Days.
Review :
Literate sports fans will appreciate the language ("There, as sweet and effortless as a Mozart minuet, all alone for a few yards deep into the end zone on the buttonhook, was Billy Bonner."); they will enjoy his sense of humor (the decor in an Austin Mexican restaurant is described as "Tex-Mex Kafka.")....There are some great old photos ( Yazoo in the early 1950); and there is a lot of love in this book. It is, as Morris asserts, "a family album of sorts." And those who stumble upon this gem from the Yoknapatawpha Press will be in for a treat. Booklist March 15, 1984 The high and low points of Morris's career as a high school athlete form the basis of most of the tales, which Morris tells in a straightforward, heartfelt manner. ...He still regrets the key fumble that might've cost his football team the most important game of the 1951 season, and he still has nightmares about Seth Morehead's unhittable curveball, which proved to be too much for Morris and his teammates in the 1952 Mississippi high school baseball tournament.... Morris is not hunting metaphors when he describes fumbles and curveballs. He remembers sports fondly and writes about them with care and precision. San Diego Union January 22, 1984 With the resonance of heady nostalgia, Willie Morris remembers well his Delta boyhood, savoring still the crossroads store with sawdust on the floor and the practical jokes and the "pretty girls with double names" and the ritual of team sport, of playing on high school football fields with their nightswarm of high-flying insects and on baseball fields surrounded by cotton in full growth.... If the book's title is evocative metaphor, it is also a summing up of how Willie Morris would indeed always stand in against the curve as he went to bat facing life's bitter bruises and its golden times. Both are remembered with equal grace in this exquisitely written search for the past. Arkansas Gazette December 18, 1983 The tales that Morris spins in Always Stand In Against the Curve parallel his own growth and development beginning with his schoolboy days in Mississippi, continuing to his college days at the University of Texas (where he was editor of The Daily Texan), extending to Europe with his receipt of a Rhodes scholarship. The longest piece of the collection, "The fumble," is a certifiable minor masterpiece. It is Morris's finest effort in the volume and an unusually valuable piece of 1950s Americana in its own right. It re-creates the magnified traumas and triumphs of high school football in the south....Along with a heartbreakingly predictable athletic drama, the story finally examines the sense of community that turns whole southern towns into single-minded, cr�pe paper-draped booster organizations....a macroscopic view of one of the most endearing social rituals of the south. Morris's sure narrative touch lends a poignant and personalized nature very rare to modern writing. The Houston Post From boyhood to middle-age, in places as far apart as Oxford, England, and Austin, Texas, Morris has enjoyed adventures as athlete and fan. Charm and mischief mark the best stories, as when Morris tells of driving his college mascot, the University of Texas longhorn steer all the way to a football game at Notre Dame....All the pieces are deeply felt, and some evoke the dreamlike playing fields of Morris's youth. Los Angeles Times The stories bring back what it was like to be seventeen in small town Mississippi. More important, they revive memories of what it was like to be an adolescent anywhere. The Milwaukee Journal
