Fight, Scrub, Fight!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #94

I haven't read a lot of the sports pulps. Perhaps its because I'm primarily a baseball fan and am largely uninterested in other sports. But if you take a unusually uninteresting sport and go Old School with it, then there's no reason I can't get interested.

So I'm going to be reading through the stories in the February 1949 issue of  New Sports Magazine, which--in addition to a baseball yarn--includes stories about football, boxing, track, basketball, and... golf? Gee whiz, if a pulp magazine can make golf interesting, it will be a reaffirmation that the pulps were the greatest source of entertaining fiction in the history of mankind.

The first story we come to is "Fight, Scrub, Fight," by John D. Macdonald. MacDonald, who would eventually hit the big time with his hard-boiled Travis McGee novels, came up out of the pulps and had that admireable talent of being able to churn out a good story in a variety of genres.

Here he tells us about Tony Sterga, a college football coash with a very methodical and effective coashing style. An important game is coming up and tradition seems to demand that he field his two weakest players (Mercer and White) because the fathers of those players had won big games years earlier.

But Tony won't do it. He doesn't have a deep bench, so he realizes he might have to play them. But barring injuries to his better players, Mercer and White will be warming the bench throughout the game.

When Mercer's father asks to meet with him, Tony expects direct pressure to play the son. But the dad knows his son isn't an athelete and should be concentrating on his studies. The older man asks Tony not to play his son.

But though Tony would rather not play Mercer, he won't make any promises. He'll do what he needs to do to win the game.

The game itself takes up the bulk of the story and MacDonald's skills as a storyteller really shine here. The prose is sharp, clear and engaging, keeping you on the edge of your seat as you follow along. Naturally, a couple of injuries forces Tony to put Mercer and White in the game.

This is predictable, as is the ending. But MacDonald manages to add a few fun twists to the outcome nonetheless.

Tony, by the way, as a wife who loves him but does wish he'd be a little less rigid. Her introduction into the story is a great example of how effective a writer was MacDonald:

Loren, her eyes still misted with sleep, smiled at him, lifted her lips to be kissed. She was Irish and her dark hair was black as a raven's wing, her blue eyes warm and tender and gently mocking.

Two brief sentences and we have all the information we need to understand her. We know that Tony has hit the Wife Jackpot and that Loren will be a counter-balance to Tony's rigidity. That is great writing.

This issue of New Sports Magazine can be found HERE.