October 7, 2008

To the Pulitzer Prize Committee:

With full enthusiasm I endorse the nomination of The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting by Dan Doyle, with Deborah Doermann Burch, for a 2008 Pulitzer Prize.

I am a poet and retired professor of English. I was and will always be a coach’s kid. I was lucky. My father was an innovative and highly successful basketball coach on the Division 1 level. He loved the game. He loved what could happen to an athlete because of the game. He loved the games’ aesthetics, its challenges, its way of bringing to an athlete a kind of experience that can happen only through a sport. When Curry Kirkpatrick, then of Sports Illustrated, was writing a story about my father, he said to my mother that he couldn’t understand why my father was so successful when he was not at all competitive. My mother smile and said, “Oh no, that’s not it. He’s competitive. He’s very competitive. He’s just not vindictive. And that’s why he’s retiring early. The games have become vindictive. That difference is destroying what matters.”

Dan Doyle knows that difference and has created a profoundly important work that leads those most intimately involved in the life of an athlete back to the values that should be and can be at the heart of one’s participation in any sport. Without ever negating excellence, he has steadfastly worked against the overwhelming onslaught of a reductive view of the value of sport in the U.S., one that not only proclaims being number one as the only goal, but clearly implies that everyone else is a loser. I remember watching a televised game last November. The analyst pronounced, “A loss here could have a dire effect on their chances for the Big Dance come March.” It was NOVEMBER! This game mattered, but not for any of the reasons Dan Doyle understands. This game mattered only in terms of the chances of being number one at the end of the season.

In Dan Doyle’s stunningly thorough book, his is a voice of sanity amidst a bedlam of hype. He knows what real loss is: the loss of what enables participation in sport to be one of the great humane, spirit-enriching ways of expressing and delighting on the complexities of being human. He knows how quickly a child can have the soul-nourishing experience of sport anesthetized by even well meaning parents. He knows what happens to our very selves when we narrow the plurality of benefits inherent in sport not only to winning but to defeating the other.

Dan Doyle’s work is in behalf of all the good that sport can bring into our days whether we are playing or rooting for a champion or shooting hoops in the driveway under a garage light. Many voices criticize, expose, and call for reform. Doyle’s voice calls for restoration and his voice offers the way that very redemption of all that is good in the world of sport that, whether we like it or not, is central to American culture. Every night, we tune into news, SPORTS, and weather. The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting acknowledges the centrality of athletics in this society and offers the right-minded guidance that those whose influence bears strongest on the participants most profoundly need. The Encyclopedia of Sports Parenting is most certainly worthy of the recognition of a Pulitzer Prize.

Sincerely,

Jack Ridl
Professor Emeritus of English