In the quarterly issue of The New York Times’ Play Magazine, Bryan Curtis, the supplement’s media columnist, opines on the genre of sports star memoir/autobiography.
“Run your eyes over my bookshelf, and next to Melville, Stendhal and Colette, you’ll find 
Bouton, Meggyesy and Canseco,” he writes crediting them as “among the intellectually adventurous athletes who have put pen to paper and written memoirs, giving sports a kind of literature.”
But these guys are not Boswell, or Churchill, Curtis says. “The sports memoir — or jockography — has not received the same critical attention as the campus novel or the hack western.” That’s because, as I write here, many of these people are “flavors of the month.” They do not have the long-lasting impact of a Mantle, Aaron, or Ruth.
Then there’s the “same ole, same ole” factor:
Most sports memoirs adhere to a rigid formula. The athlete begins by devoting several pages to his most memorable play: a great catch, a walk-off home run. This is a defensive strategy, in case we should forget why we’re reading about him. There are the compulsory chapters of childhood woe, a dim flicker of hope kept alive through sports.
“As a literary genre, the sports memoir has an inherent flaw: the best athletes often turn out the dreariest memoirs,” he says. But if you want to blame them for poor style, remember, they usually have an accomplice.
Athletes often write like sportswriters (Tiki Barber: “Your head is tilted back, and your vision is fixed on that damned prolate spheroid tumbling lazily through the air”). In most cases, this is because their books are ghostwritten by sportswriters.
Charles Einstein ghosted a Willie Mays autobiography. Several years later, according to the story, he ran into Mays and had to reintroduce himself as “the man who wrote your book.”
This separation between athlete and text has introduced a postmodern problem. Shortly after the memoirs of Charles Barkley and David Wells were published, both men claimed to have been misquoted.
Things have changed even since Bouton’s day. And you thought Ball Four was sensational?
The new sports memoirs tend toward ludicrous performance art — the literary
offspring, if you will, of Wilt Chamberlain, who asserted in “A View From Above” (1991) that he had slept with nearly 20,000 women. For years, many of us felt that no one would top the calculated daffiness of Dennis Rodman’s “Bad As I Wanna Be” (1996), in which the author appeared nude on the cover and contemplated his sexuality. But, in 2005, a promising volume came forth called “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big.”
In the end, Curtis says,
One of the interesting things revealed by the athlete memoir is that pro athletes have brutally repetitious, uninteresting lives, where even a “restless, questing mind,” which Tiki Barber claims to own, has few outlets other than a PlayStation. Sports memoirs may be intended as post-retirement victory laps, but many of them read like a cry for help.
He reprots that Canseco is working on a sequel to Juiced.
I wanted to ask Canseco about his literary process, but he said, through his manager, that he would speak with me only if I paid for the privilege. I couldn’t help but imagine Canseco hunched over his laptop, discarding drafts and wondering where his next paycheck was going to come from. As a mere mortal, I found some comfort in this. If you think playing left field is difficult, try being a writer.
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