Ernest Hemingway was the world’s most graphic sports writer. Many tried to copy him but no one succeeded, writes Frank Keating
Ernest Hemingway would have been 100 on Wednesday. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, a respectable suburb of Chicago. Hemingway was bright at school and a keen sportsman, particularly relishing boxing and baseball.
He also played tennis at the neighbourhood country club. Family holidays were spent at a lodge in the wilds of Michigan where the boy became skilled at fishing and hunting.
At 17, he ran away from home and acquired a job on the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. In 1918, he volunteered to cross the Atlantic to be an ambulance driver on the Italian front. His first service paybook recorded his civilian occupation as “Sports writer”.
He was wounded and returned to join the Toronto Star Weekly. He was European correspondent, based in Paris, by the time his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in 1923. Three years later, The Sun Also Rises was published – by which time fame, money and obsession began directing him (between alternate stints at the booze and the typewriter) to a life of hunting, fishing, tennis, boxing (or rather, sparring) and a passion for bullfighting.
Hemingway covered the great boxing events of the era – Georges Carpentier’s fights in Paris and Joe Louis’s in New York. It was not so much that he could have been the world’s most graphic sports writer; he was. His muscularly aggressive prose laid down markers for the genre. Many tried, but no one could quite copy him.
Fans began to tweezer out his one-liners: “Life itself is the most savage left-hooker of all: but after that comes Charley White of Chicago,” or “Shooting to kill gives me a real good feeling. It is faster than baseball and you are out on one strike.”
In Paris, he would spar (with seriously hurtful intent) with fellow writers F Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Best of all, he liked to spar with former champions. Hemingway boasted that once ex-contender Tom Heeney, who had fought for Gene Tunney’s heavyweight title in 1928, had been given such a bruising by the writer that he had cried “Enough!” by the fourth round and gasped, “Hey, Ernie, the two of us ought to quit this barney – or get paid for it.”
In George Plimpton’s compelling memoir (Shadow Box, 1978) the author tells of Hemingway sparring playfully with Tunney himself at his home outside Havana: “Hemingway then threw a low punch, perhaps out of clumsiness, but it hurt. It outraged Tunney, who at once feinted his opponent’s guard down, and then threw a whistling punch, bringing it up just a millimetre short of Hemingway’s face so that the fist and ridge of bare knuckles completely filled the other’s field of vision, providing immutable evidence that if Tunney had let it continue its course, Hemingway’s facial structure – nose, cheekbones, front teeth and the rest – would have snapped and collapsed inwardly. Tunney looked down the length of his arm into Hemingway’s eyes and said, `Don’t you ever do that again!'”
The admonishment was delivered with such steely venom and threat that Hemingway, apparently, gave up boxing on the spot. He returned to tennis. Pound was again a regular opponent and Hemingway wrote: “I enjoyed the luxury of our tennis greatly and we played with what was our conception of savage elegance. Ezra wore flannels. Ezra played better than I did, which is as it should be in tennis if you are to have pleasure.”
Hemingway, said the best of his biographers, Jeffrey Myers, “was an aggressive player and a bad loser who always had to have his revenge. His first wife Hadley observed, `Whenever he missed a shot he would sizzle. His racket would slash to the ground and everyone would simply stand still and cower … until he recovered himself with a curse and a laugh.'”
If Hemingway’s still-riveting short story Fifty Grand shows he fully understood the visceral horrors and courage of prize fighting, in The Sun Also Rises he has his alter ego Jake Barnes talking of sex, love and tennis and the dangerous mix therein: “He loved to win at tennis. He probably loved to win as much as [Suzanne] Lenglen, for instance. On the other hand, he was not angry at being beaten. When he fell in love with Brett his tennis game went to pieces. People beat him who never had a chance with him.”
He returned to blood sports, notably bullfighting as a proselytising convert – “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honour. Bullfighting is a good deal like Grand Opera for the really great matadors, except they run the chance of being killed every time they cannot hit a high C.”
Hemingway put to sea. “There is great pleasure in being on the sea, in the unknown wild suddenness of a great fish; in his life and death which he lives for you in an hour while your strength is harnessed to his; and there is satisfaction in conquering this thing which rules the sea it lives in.”
And if his bullfighting epic Death in the Afternoon (1932) is unquestionably in the century’s top 10 for reportage, and 1952’s The Old Man and the Sea ditto in the list for novels, he was able as well to bring his latter passion with either bloodstained harpoon or pastoral rod gloriously down to basics: “Someone just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl.”
The sports writer’s imagery remained when, in 1957, Lillian Ross asked the genius nut to sum up his life’s work: “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in a ring with Mr Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”
He blew his brains out with a hunting rifle on July 2 1961.