Sports writer’s heartfelt nostalgia shines

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This article was published 22/07/2017 (3362 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THIS memoir of being a middle-class kid in 1970s Bloomington, Minn., begins as a mildly clever slice-of-life story.

But by book’s end, it morphs into a moving account about how that time and place shaped author Steve Rushin’s view of the world.

Rushin is a writer for Sports Illustrated magazine and the author of four previous non-fiction books and a novel.

His evolution as a writer was unorthodox. His early fascination with manipulating the English language took the form, exclusively, of word games — palindromes, anagrams and puns. Oddly, he displayed little in the way of a budding interest in storytelling.

His favourite reading material, not surprisingly for a sports writer, was the notes and stats on the back of his baseball, hockey and football cards. Only later did he discover books and his parents’ modest home library.

His memoir starts as a breezy and mildly amusing take on being a kid in a suburban, middle-class, white-bread neighbourhood.

Momentous events of the decade — Watergate, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia, president Richard Nixon’s faced-with-impeachment resignation — surface only fleetingly and in the background.

His childhood woes were first-world problems par excellence. No poverty, racism or abuse touched his very ordinary upbringing.

The great tribulations of his life revolved around having the right bicycle (Schwinn), running shoes (Adidas) and jeans (Levi’s), so as to be perceived as cool by his peers.

The Sting-Ray in the book title refers to his and his friends’ mania for Schwinn’s raised-handlebar-and-banana-seat model of bicycle.

And while crisply written, the memoir is initially bereft of anything traumatic. Only in the last 100 pages does it transcend the pedestrian.

The difficult transition from childhood to early adolescence — and the deaths of his friends’ parents — interrupted his benign existence and abruptly made mortality loom large.

And it’s here his writing finally sings and gets redemptive, conveying a sense that his latent psychological wounds are at least partly healed by his telling of them here.

Paralleling the deaths and his personal changes is the decline of his beloved Bloomington — school enrolments drop, high schools close and in 1981 his suburban enclave loses both of its professional sports teams, the Minnesota Vikings and the Minnesota Twins, to a new downtown Minneapolis domed stadium. Bloomington’s heralded Metropolitan Stadium — where Rushin and his older brother were game-day commissary workers — was shuttered and subsequently levelled to make way for the Mall of America.

As most good memoirs do, Sting-Ray Afternoons ultimately, though a bit belatedly, frames Rushin’s personal legacy against a larger socio-historical place and time.

He has penned a heartfelt hymn to a country, city, neighbourhood and time. He’s also succeeded nicely in his other objective — leaving a piece of himself behind.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.