“Amazing, what you learn with your head jammed between two rugby players’ thighs.”
In “The Renegade Sportsman,” Zach Dundas looks beyond the current “American sports nation (marked by)…a bunch of dudes obsessing over fantasy football and calling their local sports-talk shows” and immerses himself into underground subcultures of sports in search of the true meaning and impact of sports.
“I like to think that I started this quest not because there’s something wrong with sports, but because there’s something right about sports,” Dundas wrote when describing the purpose of his journey. “Sports can be reinvented as a pop-cultural force; they can be a repository of weird knowledge and a vehicle for self-discovery…If all else failed, I figured drinking would be involved.”
As he soon discovered, in the underground, athletes often equal or surpass the spectators’ alcohol consumption.
The sports Dundas found along his journey ranged from cyclo-cross, which is a race, obstacle course and an excuse to get drunk while riding single-geared bicycles, to the Hash House Harriers, which isn’t so much a sport as it is a bunch of, again drunken, people running—as Forrest Gump would put it—for no particular reason at all.
The best thing about this book is how Dundas makes seemingly pointless athletic events sound just as or more exciting than the upcoming game seven of the NBA Finals. The athletes involved are rarely professionals of their sport, and if they are, they often need another job to make ends meet, which is exactly what makes them so cool.
Dundas also explores the journey sports take from unknown to mainstream. He uses women’s roller derby as an example of something on the edge of breaking out of the underground, and argues that although making a sport popular might have been the original goal, some of its magic goes away when it does.
Before it was America’s pastime, baseball was as much about spending time with friends as it was strikeout and home-run records. But now people watch other people play baseball more often than they play baseball, and as Dundas points out—isn’t the real essence of sport in physical activity?
Although this isn’t the typical book about sports, any sports fan should check it out. The colorful writing style will make you want to go out and find the renegade sportsman within you.
As Dundas wrote in the book’s epilogue, “There’s no substitute for firsthand experience. You need to stick your own head between two rugby players’ legs and let them compact your skull.”