We’re in a Sports Desert. This Football Novel Is a Tall Glass of Water.
Sports returned to America this autumn a bit warped and less than whole. Sure, there are players, there are referees, there are balls and whistles. There are also team-branded face masks, mostly empty stadiums, cardboard dogs in baseball seats, and full-body holograms serving as virtual fans during the NBA Finals. It’s fine for now, given our pandemic malaise, but if it's normalcy the leagues are reaching for, they've instead summoned what feels like a preview of our dystopian future. More than ever, we’ve been reminded that sports are an extension of modern life, not an escape from it.
For a certain type of literary soul, the sports novel is where all the noise and the strangeness of American life swirls together. Frederick Exley’s manic A Fan’s Notes (1968) remains the GOAT of the genre, one half a testament to football fandom, one half an absurdist screed against consumerism. Baseball has many entries in the canon, from Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952) to Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League (2020). Basketball has John Updike’s Rabbit novels (the first of which, Rabbit, Run, came out in 1960), Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover (2014), and Chris Leslie-Hynan’s Ride Around Shining (2014). Other notables include Leonard Gardner on boxing, Fat City (1969); C.E. Morgan on horseracing, The Sport of Kings (2016) and John Irving on wrestling, in The World According to Garp (1978).
Now arrives Corey Sobel, 35, a former jock himself, with a terrific debut novel, The Redshirt (University Press of Kentucky). Like the best sports-focused books that expand to and endure in broader cultural circles, The Redshirt is about so much more than the game it’s built around, college football. It’s about identity and race and class and sex and systems and how our old ideals of masculinity have fared in the new century. It’s both a brutal reckoning and a tender elegy, and a finalist for the 2020 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, which will be announced in December.
The Redshirt weaves together the coming-of-age stories of two freshman roommates—undersized linebacker Miles Furling and prodigy running back Reshawn McCoy—at King College, a private university in North Carolina. Though fictional, the school very much resembles Duke, where Sobel was a linebacker in the early aughts. Furling, who narrates the book, is deep in the closet and wants nothing more than to belong to a team and game that will never accept him for who he really is. As for McCoy, he withdraws from most everyone he meets, but can’t escape the local celebrity and booster-funded strings that brought him to King. Though they're both outsiders on a campus brimming with privilege and wealth, there’s distrust between Miles and Reshawn, and that tension drives much of the story.
I first met Sobel in 2019, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, in Tennessee. We hit it off; literary conferences aren’t populated much by ex-linebackers (him) or ex-army officers (me). Sincere and observant, he was more interested in talking about formative books than in networking. A few months later, he sent me a galley of The Redshirt, and I found myself transfixed. As a longtime fan of both sports and sports novels, I especially was taken by how much of Sobel resides in both Miles and Reshawn. I liked the book so much that I blurbed it.
Sobel and I recently met over socially-distanced beers on the patio of a restaurant in Brooklyn to discuss how football shaped him, writing characters from backgrounds other than his own, and the state of football today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Esquire: You share characteristics with both Miles and Reshawn, but there are some notable differences—Miles is gay, Reshawn is Black. Let’s start with Miles. Why did you feel that you could write from his point of view?
Corey Sobel: Setting aside the fact that Miles's world, the football world, is the one I know better than any other, and also setting aside the bullshit and pain that I've endured much of my life because my masculinity was found wanting, a lot of my favorite writers have narrated works from perspectives not one hundred percent their own. Willa Cather wrote from men's perspectives. Guinean author Camara Laye wrote from the perspective of a white colonizer. Tony Kushner writes from the perspectives of straight characters all the time.
Now, I think there's an argument to be made that they were able to pull this off because they—as a woman, a Black man, a gay man—have lived in systems that are dominated by straight white men, and so have no choice but to understand those systems intimately, and so can narrate them from within. I think that's true, to a point, and I know I need to have a foundational humility when it comes to going in the opposite direction, of narrating an experience of a struggle that I can't ever, not truly, know.
But I think that to dwell too much on this point is to give short shrift to those writers' talents—if their works weren't brilliantly written, sentence to sentence, scene by scene, the identities of those writers wouldn't even be up for discussion. So I guess maybe that's the formula, for me at least: humility plus whatever talent I have. And it'll be up to the reader to decide whether the result is worth the paper it's printed on.
And Reshawn, what was it like to development him as a character?
I understood Reshawn from the jump, I think, at least from the perspective of his anger and alienation, because that’s exactly how I felt at his age. I was known on the team as being a very difficult asshole a lot of the time. I was really unhappy to be there, and felt trapped in a lot of ways. So is Reshawn, which I think comes across in the book … I had a lot of people at Duke tell me over and over again that I was the smartest football player they’d ever met. And they always phrased it that way. “Football player” becomes code for a lot of other things, and that was even more true for my Black friends on the team.
It's interesting that Miles and Reshawn aren’t really friends. Maybe allies at times, but not friends.
I don’t think either of them is capable of friendship, for different reasons. Miles is too guarded. Reshawn is much too bitter about what’s happening to be available emotionally in the way he would have to be to be friends with anyone on the team. Plus Reshawn makes it clear he’s uncomfortable with homosexuality, even before he finds out Miles is gay. I wanted to get at the baseline homophobia that even the more progressive people on a football team, at least in 2003, 2004, when I played, likely would have had.
There are hardly any out professional or college football players in the game today, and fans seem fine with that—they think that’s just the way it is, gay men don’t play football. That seems like such a bellwether of both what’s wrong with football from a cultural standpoint, but also what makes it so deeply indicative of things that people don’t want to think about—about how football’s values are still the values of a lot of this country. In football, there’s been no reckoning between its status as a pop culture mainstay and its deep homophobia.
When did you first become interested in the game?
There are families that identify by religion, or by ethnicity, or by geography. And my family has all those things but the one overriding source of self for my family was football. Every boy in my mom's extended family played. I grew up with stories about my uncles playing football in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, which is in Golden, Colorado, where I was born. My grandfather had a bridge on his upper teeth because his four front teeth got knocked out when he was playing. When I was 14, the cousin I was closest to growing up was killed by a drunk driver, and he has a football-shaped headstone.
Football was the culture that I was raised in, so it was always a given that I would play. For a lot of boys in my position, you just sort of wait until your body doesn't cooperate and you leave the game. But the opposite was true for me. I just had a talent for it from an early age, and that built and built.
What about your interest in writing?
There's a moment that I've been thinking about a lot. I was fourteen and entering freshman year, and my mom and I were visiting a prestigious football school. We sat down with the head coach for a meeting. My mom is this huge personality, and she did a lot of the talking. At a certain point, she looked at the coach and said, “I want him to be an All-American, but I also want him to write The Great American Novel.” It embarrassed the hell out of me, but that's a good indication of where I came from. That those two ambitions can coexist.
You later moved to the greater DC area, and attended DeMatha, a Catholic high school. Good academics, big football school. While there, your relationship to the game changed. Walk us through that.
If I fucked up on a play during a scrimmage, I would come home and do hundreds of jump ropes. There were a couple times when I was so angry at myself I'd run hills at midnight, two in the morning. I was monomaniacal. That obsessiveness carried into my junior year. I had a terrific year from a football perspective. But I was an unusually good student, so the school placed me in honors English.
My teacher noticed that I was getting into the readings to an unusual degree, and he asked if I wanted to do an independent study. I read The Waste Landwith him, E.A. Robinson … I learned how to do scansion and I just very quickly I was like, This is what I want to do. I just want to be immersed in literature. I started realizing that there were parts of me that didn't have anything to do with football that were there to be cultivated and this was coinciding with an increased scrutiny and skepticism of Catholicism, my family’s second religion, if you will. So I think literature in a lot of ways gave me a new belief system. That was just enough for me to see myself as more than just a body.
I worshipped football. The coaches were like gods … When I [later] fell out with football, it was an act of apostasy.
It would be awhile before you gave up football. First, college. Why Duke?
I was like, I'm going to start thinking of this as just a way to get into school and to be at school and I will also keep becoming a writer and those things can coexist. When I got to Duke, it became clear that those things couldn’t coexist [for me].
How so?
One coach and I just butted heads a ton. He was a tyrant, I was kind of a punk. There was this film meeting my freshman year. I was really pissed off to be there because I wanted to be in class, so I brought a book of Keats' poetry and started reading it during film. He caught me. So, I wasn't allowed to bring my book bag to the football building from then on. Things got worse. I'd joke that the school made a mistake by giving me a scholarship, and people would laugh it off, thinking that I was just being funny. I was not being funny.
Long story short, I ended up leaving the game after my sophomore season.
As an ex-football player, as a writer, as a citizen, how do you view the state of football in America in 2020?
In preparation for the book release, I’ve been reading more about football than I have in the last ten years. And there’s a very good reason why I’ve stayed away. What is really both fortuitous and incredibly disheartening about the topicality of my book is that you could change a couple technical aspects of it, take away characters’ Nokias and give them iPhones instead, and the story might as well be happening now.
The NCAA is pretty much a rickety laughingstock, and it’s no surprise that the conferences have been allowed to do whatever the fuck they want during Covid. I hope what people get out of this whole mess is that these coaches, these teams, have never existed to protect players. That was never the intention of the system that they set up and that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. The point of it all is profit, and it is to benefit the adults in charge of these kids.
Then there’s the other side of it all. A lot of people have told me, “Oh, I don’t watch football anymore,” because of the concussions, or in solidarity with the players who've protested, or whatever. And that’s fine. But who are these people talking to? I think that liberals in Brooklyn are talking to themselves, because that conversation is not happening in Tuscaloosa or in College Station. Football's not insulated from the rest of the country. It represents a basic impulse, and the set of beliefs that drives the game is also part of the communities that feed into the game. So when people say—and I hate being this broad— “Why should I care about football?” I'm like, “This is your fucking country, man.”
You Might Also Like