S.L. Price, a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated from 1994-2019, has written five books—including the newly released The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse, a wide-ranging examination of the continent’s oldest and most representative sport.
At Lit Hub the author tagged four top "sports books that aren’t really about sports." One title on the list:
The Mosquito Bowl by Buzz BissingerRead about another entry on the list.
Perhaps the biggest bait-and-switch in sports book history. Consider: This is the author of Friday Night Lights, the movie and TV series-spawning best-seller about Texas high school football. Title and cover copy says that it’s about a“bruising and bloody” football game on Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve, 1944, between two Marine regiments composed of 56 former college players, including three All-Americans and 22 starters from powers like Notre Dame and Purdue. Yet, Bissinger knows that focusing on a glorified pick-up game in such a context is absurd; months later, more than a dozen of the 65 men who played were killed on Okinawa. So, whether by choice or the fact that no broadcast or play-by-play on the game, exists, this is a “sports” book with almost no sport in it. The Mosquito Bowl itself, which ended with the score 0-0, takes up one paragraph in 337 pages.
Instead, Bissinger produced an impeccably researched and agonizingly compassionate record of the heroes’ lives and deaths, a relentless litany of the Pacific War’s gore, death and body-ravaging horrors, as well as an aging son’s tribute to his forever war-numbed father. In the end, it’s a reversal of a sports book, a story about being uprooted from whatever we believe is “civilized,” taken away from games and all they evoke of health, peace, youth and home, and forced to wield that wondrous athletic skill in a landscape resembling hell.
(See also: The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski, and The Real All-Americans by Sally Jenkins)
--Marshal Zeringue