MotherReader requests reviews of our favorite sports books. Alas, though I wrote about The Crazy Horse Electric Game for The Five Owls, it's not available online. Here's something else by Crutcher:



Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher. 1991; HarperTempest, 2002
(0-06-050783-7) $6.99 pb

Aside from one story which first appeared in the anthology
Connections, this is a collection of original stories with an
interesting link: although complete in themselves, each one revisits
a character from one of Crutcher's sports novels--and often not a
character you'd expect to revisit. For example, Willie Weaver, the
protagonist of The Crazy Horse Electric Game gets only minor
mention by the narrator of "Telephone Man," a slow-witted, racist teen
who is unexpectedly faced with the falsity of stereotypes.

The main characters in these stories are all boys, mostly athletes,
trying to find courage as they deal with turning points in their
lives. One boy is forced to try to forgive someone who grievously
injured him; another boy struggles to hold onto his sense of right and
wrong despite pressure from his friends and the power of his own
prejudices. These stories pack quite a punch, and although the
collection as a whole suffers a bit from redundancy of phrases and
jokes, and I was irked by the fact that every female athlete
mentioned winds up giving up her sport for the sake of her social
life, I found that, as always, Crutcher not only makes reading about
sports appealing to people who don't like them, but also make
us understand why people do.