"Hell's Angels", Hunter Thompson: An Example from a Hero

I bought this copy in 2009 from the Housing Works bookstore in SoHo. I think it was a quarter. The cover wasn't as jacked up as that when I bought it; that all happened as I'd have the book in my pocket as I walked around. See, in the City, you need something to read on the subway, and I always tried to have a book or a newspaper handy.

Hunter Thompson is one of my intellectual heroes, and I've modeled different projects as direct inspirations from Hunter's work.

Hell's Angels is a history of the returning WWII vets finding solace in groups, all riding motorcycles like they had during the war. They took club names from their old military divisions, and occasionally got into scrapes with other clubs and small-town constabulatory forces.

They weren't always seen as a public danger. They didn't really keep up with society's level of hygiene, but they did enjoy a brief level of notoriety as being a public commentator of political issues--no joke.

The rise and fall of Sonny Barger's group, being invited to an unwitting Kesey acid party at La Honda, getting onto television and in print interviews was all pretty good and heady for the group. Then reports of brutal rapes filtered in, mostly unsubstantiated, and then a fight between two guys spilled over into a small coastal California town, and the Angels were from then on outlaws in the bad sense, not in the romantic good sense.

This book also showed off Hunter's take on Tom Wolfe and Plimpton's New Journalism. With the other proponents, Wolfe set about establishing New Journalism as a thing where writers could use the methods of story-telling normally reserved for fiction in telling a non-fiction story. Hunter's take on that topic is usually called Gonzo Journalism, but is only shown here in his approach. It was Hunter's contention that the author of any piece was inextricable from said piece, and would eventually become part of the story.

Tom Wofle's The Right Stuff is an example of New Journalism. Using plot and character development, Wolfe weaves an exciting story of bat-shit crazy test pilots fighting for the chance to sit on a rocket and light a match.

George Plimpton's One For the Record shows his attempt, an approach a little closer to Hunter's, where the author has a part in the story of one man and his attempt to survive his march to history.

Hell's Angels isn't Gonzo Journalism exactly, but how is it set up? Hunter joins them, and reports the world as how he sees it, not even feigning impartiality. He just accepts that being impartial is an illusion, and that's the legacy that I'm a part of, at least with the blogging anyway.

"The Game", Ken Dryden: One of the Best Sports Books Ever

I was reading out sports books online a few months ago, and came across a passionate fan of Ken Dryden's seminal The Game. I found it for sale online for very cheap, so cheap that the shipping cost more, something I've been finding lately with some of my purchases.

This copy was one of the Canadian paperbacks, which I thought was pretty cool, since this is one of the best selling books in Canada's history.

Ken Dryden played goalie for the Montreal Canadiens hockey team during one of their dynastic runs. The Canadiens are the NHL's version of the Yankees, having separate dynasties and winning the most championships in the league's history. Dryden went on to become a lawyer and lawmaker, and served in an elected position in their parliament.

The book was described by various sources as the best book about hockey by far, and possibly the best sports book ever. Well, I like reading, and I like sports, so there was the natural-ness of the whole shebang.

Reading in the introduction about how Dryden would scratch out notes on pads at his locker after periods, or on receipts or on random hotel stationary, but then he had a sickening realization that those thoughts and feelings he'd written wouldn't comprise a book in the sense he'd originally thought when he started the project. That topic is in the first few sentences in the introduction, letting readers know what they're getting into.

Touching on philosophy, memories, teamwork, leadership, and the drive for excellence, The Game is a classic in any discipline.

The last three books have been examples from my sports-book pocketbooks collections, and each covers a different iconic player from their sport: Hank, Pele and Dryden. This book is best of the three in terms of the writing.

"Pele: My Life and the Beautiful Game": The Greatest

This book was wrongly delivered to a house I lived in, and where we were in our lives, we opened the package up, and I ended up keeping it.

It's really good, and helped me understand Pele, Brazilian soccer, the late '50s through the '70s in international soccer, and the effect soccer---and Pele---has on the world, still today.

And that's pretty much it. This book has many pages for such a light collection of anecdotes. They're all very entertaining, and you get a tiny glimmer of what life in Brazil might be like, a country that's not fed the politics of the threat of global war.

In Brazil it's all about integration, dancing, soccer, and bathing suits made out of dental floss...a more magical place couldn't be created in fiction. Except for those murder rates...

"Hank Aaron: One for the Record", George Plimpton: This is Why the Hammer is One of My Favortites

I can't remember where I got this, but I'm thinking I picked it up for a quarter or fifty cents from some paperback pile.

Oh man, oh man, oh man! I'm a baseball fan, and a Yankee fan at that, which pretty much makes me an asshole (I do my best to not be obnoxious), but I'd never really considered Hank for a top spot in my pantheon of baseball heroes.

That's changed.

Now I go and preach the merits of "the Hammer" to baseball fan and non- alike.

In this tiny book George Plimpton, of Mousterpiece Theater cartoons from the Disney Channel, of the New Journalism school of intellectual thought with Tom Wolfe, the Intellivision video game console shill, et al, focused his attention on the event of Henry passing Babe Ruth's career homerun record. It reads mostly like an article for the New Yorker or an artsy piece from Rolling Stone.

It's one of my favorite sports books: it's breezy yet deep, it never lingers, and it introduced me to a new world where Hank Aaron was one of the greats. I always knew that, you know, from the stats alone (when he retired he had the most homeruns, RBIs, runs, and was second for hits, and hit over .300 for his career). This book opened up my eyes to the visceral impact of his life (he started in the Negro Leagues!)(his life was threatened everyday for months) had on the game and America.

Plimpton, knowing that he has really only one fleeting moment around which to build an entire writing project--one pitch that gets hit over the fence for homer #715, eclipsing the Babe's 714 career mark, up to recently figured untouchable--decides to focus on different aspects of that fleeting moment.

His subjects are The Observer, The Pitcher, The Hitter, The Ball, The Retriever, The Fan, The Announcer. He visits a baseball factory; the guy who plays Chief Nok-a-Homer, the mascot in full headdress and costume; a wild fan in Atlanta that makes statues of Hank; Hanks's folks.

The world in which Hank Aaron played baseball was far different from today's. The country was still very segregated and it was more accepted to be obviously hostile and prejudiced toward black players. One of my favorite parts of the book is a telling quote from Hank's father:

"Henry was in baseball for work."

It was a job.

I've been one of the few who talk up Hank's status as underrated. The guy isn't ranked nearly high enough in most All-Time lists.

Go Hammer!