SIDELINE CUT: The lionisation of the school sports stars - the jocks - is a particularly American conceit and it has become jaded by now. But it remains true and universal too.
TOWARDS THE end of The Catcher in the Rye, Mr Antolini frets that Holden Caulfield, his former pupil, is in for a "terrible, terrible fall".
“It may be the kind where, at the age of 30 you sit in some bar hating everybody who comes in looking as if they might have played football in college.”
That hardly qualifies as the worst fall one could have in life. Nonetheless, was there ever a character or a book that repudiated the mythology and appeal of sports culture – and in particular school sports culture – as effectively as old Holden did in JD Salinger’s perpetual classic?
It is hardly a coincidence that in the opening chapter Holden is alone on a hill watching a football game starring the team from the school from which he is about to be expelled, Pencey Prep. For the millions of people/Holden devotees who passed through school and did not play sport, here was someone in a place they recognised.
The lionisation of the school sports stars – the jocks – is a particularly American conceit and it has become jaded by now. But it remains true and universal too.
You can see it in this country. Go to the Hogan Cup and watch the best young GAA teams. Go to the Leinster Schools Cup and watch the gilded sons of those establishments. Go to the basketball arena in Tallaght when the cup finals are on in March. These are all fine and wonderful traditions – sporting institutions themselves – and they undoubtedly help to promote and instil the values and ethics the increasingly beleaguered teaching profession is trying to pass on: team-work, pride in the school, the upholding of a legacy, winning, success, fraternity.
But do not pretend for a moment that these competitions do not revolve around an element of hero-worship, where the boys who star on their respective sports teams stride the corridors and, rightly or wrongly, are made to feel as though they have the world at their feet. And for the outsider looking in, for the kid with no interest or little natural ability when it comes to sport, that concentration of time and energy on the glorification of this one team, this entity, these few individuals, can be tremendously crushing.
Ask Janis Ian.
Of course, adolescence is not always a black-and-white division between the jocks and sensitive souls. For all the out-and-out jocks out there, there are countless other youngsters torn between the thrill and competitive zeal of playing sports and the constant kind of questioning and doubting that accompanies Holden Caulfield’s immortal lost weekend in 1950s NYC.
In fact, there must be many people out there who either received or were handed a copy of The Catcher in the Ryewho, after falling under the spell of its voice, decided the sporting life, with all its regulations and disciplines, its comical machismo and "inspiring" speeches, was not for them.
There must have been thousands of gifted footballers or swimmers or whatever who were prompted by Holden’s contrary take on life to disappear into music and literature and the rest of it.
On Thursday evening, I was flicking between the RTÉ news and a college basketball game between Duke and Florida State on ESPN when the standard, black-and-white photograph of JD Salinger appeared behind Eileen Dunne. Even before she began the announcement, it was obvious the great recluse had bowed out. Salinger’s disappearance from public life and his steadfast silence that has governed his art is without precedent – although in my opinion, Ciarán McDonald, the great stylist on Mayo football teams from ’96 to ’07 and a man who seems to share Holden Caulfield’s suspicion of phonies, is giving him a damn good run for his money – and has become almost as famous a story as his most famous creation.
But as I switched back to the basketball, it occurred to me that Duke, one of the most prestigious and expensive of the American colleges, is precisely the kind of institution that Holden rails against.
The basketball team has become symbolic of everything the college is supposed to represent: clean-cut, selfless, brilliant, sporting, relentlessly successful, immaculately presented and polite, its people on the fast track to the brighter life. And because of those virtues, it can come across as preppy, self-regarding, smug, superior and acne-free.
Hating Duke and all it represents has become an alternative American pastime and would have made ideal fodder for Holden’s unforgettable brand of caustic disillusionment.
Now that JD Salinger has gone, it seems inevitable that his passing will mean that generations across the world for whom The Catcher in the Ryemeant everything will be prompted to present their unsuspecting offspring with a copy of the book.
Watch the sales surge in coming weeks. It ought to lead to comical reactions. Sometimes, the passing of cultural touchstones just does not work.
Recently, I had occasion to put a TV show on for a bunch of six-year-old lads. Flicking through the endless and often unpronounceable range of cartoon shows available now, I was astounded and overjoyed to come across one that was old even when I was young: Top Cat.
Remember him? Lived in a tin can engaging in an eternal battle of wits with Officer Dibble, he was a cat, as the theme tune advised, “whose intellectual close friends got to call him TC”. We turned it on.
Within seconds, it was clear a grave mistake had been made. These boys eyed me with a look that fell between pity and contempt. And they were right. The graphics were minimalist to the point of being desolate. Top Cat himself had an annoying kind of voice. Benny, his sidekick, was up to nothing. The children indulged the show for the bones of a minute before one said, as injudiciously as possible: “This doesn’t seem to be very good.”
And that was that.
Chances are there is a whole wave of teenagers out there who are about to become acquainted with Holden Caulfield and who will find that the voice of this 17-year-old from 59 years ago simply means nothing to them. But there will be many others who will fall under the elusive magic of the book and feel, as tens of thousands have attested, that this cranky youngster is speaking exclusively to them.
And you can bet money that many of these new fans will belong to schools where sport – the team, the game, The Cup(!), the records, the school anthems, the famous outhalf, the former All-Ireland winners, the chosen ones – are held up as the ideal of what it is to be young and alive and searching for something.
And for many, of course, those games and races do nothing but reinforce that sense of not being included, of being outside the realm of conventional popularity and success. For many kids in the days and years ahead, the news that Holden Caulfield, moody and grieving, is up there on that hill watching some football game that means nothing to him will be good news indeed.
And many, of course, will become curious about the man who created him.
As the famous line goes, “What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it”.
Fat chance of that now.
Mr Salinger is finally unavailable.
