The Bookseller.com

17th May 2008

Graham Sharpe is media relations director of William Hill, and co-founder of the W H Sports Book of the Year Award.

Sport beats highbrow

01.10.07

Nick Hornby won it; Tim Parks has made it onto the shortlist—just as he did for the Man Booker Prize. Gordon Brown's biographer Tom Bower has won it, as has political commentator Peter Oborne. Geoffrey C Ward, winner of America's National Book Critics Circle Award, is the most recent recipient; and Donald McRae, whose book on heart transplants earned plaudits, is the only person ever to have won it twice.

With authors of this stature associated with the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, it is tough to understand why the literary world seems to look down its nose at sports writing. I regard most of the 18 winners as the equals of the majority of the winners of big fiction and non-fiction prizes during that time. Can anyone seriously argue that John Banville's 2005 Man Booker winner, The Sea, is a better read or better written than Gary Imlach's moving My Father and Other Working Class Heroes (William Hill winner in 2005)? Or that Fever Pitch (1992) was not as groundbreaking as The English Patient?

The days when the highlight of the sportswriting year was the publication of David Beckham/Wayne Rooney/Lewis Hamilton—My Life Story, Aged 19 and a Half are long gone. There is, of course, still a market for this kind of book. But it takes rather more insight and writing ability to impress a William Hill judging panel that includes doyen of sports journalists Hugh McIlvanney, the BBC's John Inverdale and Times literary critic Alyson Rudd.

Yet sports books still struggle to push their way onto the review pages of national newspapers, and are rarely treated as seriously as literary novels—which are highly touted but often fail to capture the imagination of readers. Why should acclaim be heaped on pretentious authors who invent improbable situations for unlikely characters, add even less credible plot twists, and then justify the whole sorry creation via narcissistic self-analysis? Especially while their sporting contemporaries toil away for a pittance and battle for recognition.

So champion your here-today, gone-tomorrow novels if you must. But for plotlines as far-fetched, dramatic, meaningful and exciting as anything the McEwans, Rushdies, Atwoods and Desais can formulate, but also boasting truth and relevance, sports books leave novels standing in the blocks, stuck on the grid, clean bowled, hit for six, out for the count and two goals down with a minute to play.