This question is a little farther afield than our usual UNC-related Questions of the Day, but bear with me here. The other week, I was visiting a friend in Columbus, Ohio, and this friend took me to The Book Loft, reportedly one of the country’s biggest independent bookstores. Each room of The Book Loft corresponds to a different genre or set of genres, and in my exploration, I happened upon a small nook that contained their Sports offerings.
And I was immediately reminded how paltry the usual offerings
are in this realm. There are a couple of standouts and classics, to be sure, but nearly everything else, certainly everything that’s made most visible, is either a love letter to an entire sport that’s so general as to be nearly meaningless, or a coach/player auto/biography that covers the same beats and sports cliches that we’ve all heard a million times before. The relevant and notable exception, of course, is To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever by Will Blythe:
Not only is Blythe’s book ideologically agreeable, it’s a genuinely excellent bit of writing. Blythe, much more successfully than I have whenever I’ve tried to tackle the subject, not only fleshes out the personality of the UNC-Duke men’s basketball rivalry, but writes skillfully about individual games and players, the backdrop of the urban/suburban American South that animates everything about this contrast, and does it all through what’s usually the hopelessly boring genre of “inside the locker room for a season” (The 2024 national champion women’s soccer team released a documentary about their season that follows this format, and it is unfortunately an absolute nothing-burger. It’s not the participants’ fault; their job is not to make interesting media, but it was still disappointing). It’s funny, nostalgic, and moving, and its specificity to the UNC-Duke rivalry, let alone the season it focuses on, gives the reader real emotions with which they can identify, whether or not they have experience in this particular relationship. Blythe’s work makes clear what should be a wider-spread rule of writing: Specifics are more general than generalities.
Do you, too, believe Blythe’s book to be the sterling example of sportswriting nonfiction? Are there other UNC-related works that I’m missing? I do love Adam Lucas, but I find that his prose works much better as an article-writer than in book form, where his brand of treacle can get overwhelming. I also do have to shout out Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, my favorite piece of sports-related fiction. Fountain is a New Bern native and UNC grad, so it’s not entirely unrelated, even if the book itself has nothing to do with the Tar Heels — it’s instead a trip through the mind of an Iraq War veteran being celebrated at a Dallas Cowboys game, struggling with the inconsistencies between his own lionization at home and the realities of his situation abroad, and also the striking similarities he finds between the crowd’s ignorance and distance from him and their removal from the violence happening to the players on the field they’ve paid to attend. It’s a fascinating and uniquely American piece of contemporary literature that I can’t recommend enough. I’m looking forward to hearing y’all’s thoughts on the subject.
