Poetry Madness: Kobe Edition

Basketball fans might be surprised that Kobe Bryant chose poetry as the medium to announce his official retirement from the NBA, but poetry and athletics have been deeply yoked since ancient Greece. We speak of poems in athletic terms—the “body” of the text, a “muscular” rhythm, “feet,” “gait.” And we use poetic descriptions in sports: the pitch was “pure poetry,” the players got into a “rhythm.” Lord Byron was a noted pugilist; the 18th-century haiku masters Buson and Issa enjoyed sumo. Walt Whitman frequently reported on Brooklyn baseball games; Marianne Moore threw out the first pitch of the 1968 baseball season at Yankee Stadium.

In honor of Bryant, I’ve pitted 16 sports poems against one another—with both “sports” and “poems” arbitrarily defined––in a March Madness–style tournament to determine which sports poem should be crowned victorious. The four regions: Basketball, Baseball, Football, and Running. I’ve provided analysis below on the results of each match.

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Round of 16

Baseball

“Casey at the Bat” (Ernest Lawrence Thayer, 1888) vs. “A Poem about Baseballs” (Denis Johnson, 1995): “The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day,” begins Thayer’s iconic, melodramatic depiction of a heartbreaking loss for the home team. Johnson’s poem is a disorienting meditation using baseball imagery to express fears about growing up. Johnson skillfully layers images and voices from multiple perspectives. Thayer’s narrator crafts the scene as though announcing the game from the press box. But Johnson’s delicately creepy enjambment, with its echoes of Superman—“is that the ball, or is / it just a bird”—is no match for the “ten thousand eyes” and “five thousand tongues” watching mighty Casey’s whiff. Casey might have blown the game for the Mudville Nine, but Thayer wins the round.

“Baseball and Writing” (Marianne Moore, 1961) vs. “The crowd at the ball game” (William Carlos Williams, 1938): Modernist against modernist; the two go mano a mano in a tough early lineup. Moore and Williams were both noted baseball fans, and both put readers in the heart of the game. For Williams, baseball is like both the “Inquisition” and the “Revolution.” For Moore, baseball is like writing: “You can never tell with either / how it will go.” But Moore edges out Williams for advising that Yogi Berra be assigned to Cape Canaveral because “he can handle any missile.”

Running

“wish you were here you are” (Rachel Zucker, 2014) vs. “The Song of the Ungirt Runners” (Charles Hamilton Sorley, 1915): These two poems begin as visceral experiences of running and transcend to a metaphysical meditation on life. Sorley, a Scottish poet who was killed at age 20 in World War I, describes the sheer joy of pounding feet against earth in ballad meter: “We run because we like it / Through the broad bright land.” Zucker is not as athletically gifted as Sorley ––“I run through Central Park / at a speed not much faster than walking but slightly,” she confesses–– but the poem itself careens through time, and every enjambment enacts either a single step or a quantum leap. The tortoise takes the hare. Zucker moves to the next round.

“To an Athlete Dying Young” (A.E. Housman, 1896) vs. “Three Blind Mice” (English nursery rhyme, c. 1600): A close call between two classic elegies to terrific runners. In its godlike description of a youth cut off in his prime, “To an Athlete Dying Young” echoes Milton’s “Lycidas,” his famous elegy to his young friend; Housman’s poem can also be read as a lament to fallen soldiers. “Three Blind Mice” is strikingly economical in its description—all we know about the mice is that they are blind and that they run in perfect unison, yet running leads them to their demise. The hero defeats the mice.

Basketball

“Dear Basketball” (Kobe Bryant, 2015) vs. “Stay Schemin’” (lyrics by Rick Ross, vocals by Drake and French Montana, 2012): Kobe’s retirement poem isn’t the star’s first bardic turn; Bryant is also an aspiring rapper, and one of his songs is called “Thug Poet.” “Dear Basketball” has some inspired enjambment—“And shooting imaginary / Game-winning shots” neatly turns the child’s fantasy into reality––but the poem is primarily a conventional, free-verse narrative. “Stay Schemin’” uses the myth of Kobe to weave a cautionary tale against divorce: “Kobe ’bout to lose a hundred fifty M’s,” raps Drake. The rap’s conceit is cleverer than Bryant’s letter to basketball. But it’s Kobe. The sports legend sails past.

“Talk” (Terrance Hayes, 2006) vs. “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” (Yusef Komunyakaa, 2001): “Slam, Dunk & Hook” is an impressively synesthetic rendition of what it feels like to be absorbed in a game yet hyper-aware of everyone around you. “Talk,” by the gifted formalist and former college basketball player Hayes, is the only basketball poem Hayes has written, but it’s a doozy. The poem uses a middle-school locker room after a basketball game as a setting to investigate racism, as well as friendship and adolescence, and Hayes draws on language and motion from the game to evoke raw emotions. His disarmingly simple, powerful poem forces readers to confront discomfort directly. Hayes for the win.

Football

“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (James Wright, 1959) vs. “Say Goodbye to Big Daddy” (Randall Jarrell, 1969): Two midcentury classics compete for dominance. Randall Jarrell’s elegy turns the football field into the place where Big Daddy excelled; though he experienced pain and prejudice in the rest of his life, football was a world in which he could triumph. But in just 12 lines, Wright transforms a heroic game into a gladiatorial combat. That arresting last stanza, in which the “suicidally beautiful” boys “gallop terribly against each others’ bodies,” gives Wright the edge.

“Footballitis” (Adidas commercial, by the Swedish directing collective Traktor, 2002) vs. “football dreams” (Jacqueline Woodson, 2014): The Adidas commercial, created for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, is the only advertisement in the tournament. The footballers (soccer players in American-ese) in the commercial have football tarantella: they constantly move their feet in kicking or dribbling motions. Woodson’s “football dreams” narrates the American dream vis-à-vis the sport: the father, who is black, gets a ticket into a new life through a football scholarship to the Ohio State University. Woodson, the Buckeyes, and the American dream defeat the crazed soccer players.

Quarterfinals

Baseball

“Casey at the Bat” vs. “Baseball and Writing”: Moore’s magpie genius for putting together many voices and images is on full force, but Thayer’s classic steamrolls the competition.

Running

“wish you were here you are” vs. “To an Athlete Dying Young”: Zucker might have defeated one rousing running rhyming poem, but cue the Chariots of Fire theme music for Housman’s stirring exhortation.

Basketball

“Dear Basketball” vs. “Talk”: Here, Kobe falls short. Hayes writes with tight rhythm and sharp language that turns on a dime—the title, “Talk,” immediately flows into the first indelible line, “like a nigger now, my white friend M. said.” Bryant’s loose free verse can’t keep up with Hayes’s pyrotechnic force.

Football

“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” vs. “football dreams”: Ohio versus Ohio. The much-anthologized classic versus the contemporary classic. Woodson’s poem is passionate, but Wright has sentiment in spades. Woodson’s poem evocatively deals with racial prejudices and family matters. However, Wright’s short lyric has become a part of American mythology. Woodson’s poem will certainly leap to legend status over the years, but today Wright moves into the semifinals.

Semifinals

“Casey at the Bat” vs. “To an Athlete Dying Young”: Two old chestnuts, almost impossible to compare. “Casey at the Bat” bears the aura of a Cracker Jack box, whereas Housman’s elegy aspires to loftier heights. Nostalgia wins. Mighty Casey triumphs to make it to the finals.

“Talk” vs. “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”: Both use sports to talk about broad national issues. Both pull off daring rhetorical feats. Wright’s devastating use of “Therefore,” which is on its own line at the beginning of the final stanza, is jarring and effective. But Hayes manages to compose “Talk” in one long sentence that’s both elegant and tense, edging out Wright’s syntactical tactics by a nose. Wright might be the favorite, but Hayes takes “Talk” to the finals.

Third Place

“To an Athlete Dying Young” vs. “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”: The battle of the rousing ode versus the poignant lyric. Lyric easily wins. Wright has the bronze.

Finals

“Casey at the Bat” vs. “Talk”: Thayer’s poem has had tremendous staying power over the past century. Merl Reagle, the legendary crossword constructor who passed away in August, wrote one of his last puzzles about Thayer’s poem. In “The Homer That Never Happened,” published June 20, 2014, the crossword grid is shaped like a baseball diamond, and running diagonally from home plate back to home plate, tracing a diamond shape around the center of the puzzle, Reagle embeds the ending of Thayer’s poem “Casey at the Bat”: BUT THERE IS NO JOY IN MUDVILLE MIGHTY CASEY HAS STRUCK OUT.

And yet, Hayes’s ending seals the deal: “I’d just like to say I heard it, but let it go, / because I was afraid to lose our friendship / or afraid we'd lose the game — which we did anyway.” Of course, this is poetry, not the NBA—there are no rankings, and there are no winners and losers—but today, Hayes’s Cinderella story triumphs.