Field notes: 5 books about sports by UVA authors
From the soccer pitch to the football field to the baseball diamond, here are five wide-ranging books about sports by UVA professors and alumni.
Sports Illustrated shaped the image of female athletes for millions of readers. Hagerman, an associate professor in UVA’s Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality, argues that the criteria the magazine established for the female athletes who appeared in its pages was the same used for the women who appeared in its annual swimsuit edition. In both cases, the women portrayed were “attractive, often scantily clad, and above all, traditionally feminine,” she writes. “Rarely did the achievements of female athletes generate the hype in the magazine devoted to its female swimsuit models.” Hagerman chronicles the progress made by athletes such as Serena Williams and Megan Rapinoe and examines how definitions of feminine beauty have evolved.
Facing a mid-career crisis he dubbed “Common Sportswriter Malaise,” Culpepper, a columnist who has worked at ESPN and The Washington Post, decamped for England, where he immersed himself in the renowned Premier League. Culpepper embedded with the fans of an underdog club, following them to stadiums and pubs. The journey had the desired effect of renewal for the burned-out journalist while also enlightening readers unfamiliar with the fanatical world of English soccer. Bloody Confused! provides a primer on the history of the Premier League and compares the sports cultures and ethics of England and the U.S. Culpepper rediscovers what led him to sports in the first place: the joy of unabashed fandom.
In this memoir, English professor and cultural critic Edmundson looks back at his high school football career to examine what it means to play the game he calls a “potentially ennobling, potentially intoxicating school for the spirit.” He contemplates the game’s place in American culture and argues that we need a deeper understanding of football than the one offered by coaches and broadcasters. “We need to recognize how much football can give, yes: the game can be a superb school for body, heart and mind,” he writes. “But we also need to see how much harm football can do, and not just to the body.”
With The Art of Fielding, Harbach, a graduate of UVA’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, authored a debut novel that The New York Times immediately placed in the pantheon of great baseball books. Protagonist Henry Skrimshander is a star shortstop at Westish College in Wisconsin. He’s on the verge of tying an NCAA record for consecutive errorless games by a shortstop when he makes a throw that badly injures a teammate. According to the New York Times review, the book captures its characters “at that tipping point in their lives when their dreams, seemingly within reach, suddenly lurch out of their grasp.”
Brenkus, who created and hosted the Emmy-winning ESPN show Sport Science, dives into data and scientific research to predict how fast anyone will ever run, how much weight they will lift and how high they will jump. He notes that before 1954, it was widely believed that no one could run a mile in under four minutes. Then Roger Bannister broke that barrier, and within 10 years, 336 people had done it. “Once athletes knew they could do it, they did it, in droves and ever faster, each new record becoming just another obstacle to overcome,” Brenkus writes. The question he ultimately poses is: “Does it ever end?” Brenkus, who died in 2025, argues that it must at some point, “at least until we evolve into another species altogether.”
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