MY LIFE IN SPORTS

A fictional autobiography unfolds through the lens of a lifelong passion for sports.

Weber’s novel centers on young Ricky Schubert, whom readers meet as a boy in Alabama. Ricky is dealing with school, sports, and his family. His grandmother MiMi, a golfer, was in her heyday a “Woman City Champion” in Birmingham, Alabama; his mother was a daughter of the “Solid South” in the mid-20th century; and his father was a “Taft Republican.” Ricky’s father quickly becomes the most memorable character in the book’s early segments, deftly evoked by Weber’s prose (“Bare ropy forearms reddened by the Midwestern sun but pale above the sharp demarcation at the biceps where his short sleeves normally belled”). Ricky is a student at St. Xavier High School when his mother contracts leukemia (“They rammed tubes up her nose,” the author writes unsparingly of her ordeal. “Hooked needles into her forearms. An IV bottle emptied into her as she dozed”) and dies. The narrative follows Ricky through all the stages of his life, moving him to Rangoon as a lieutenant on a Navy destroyer in what he describes as “a perfect Kipling scene,” full of vivid details. “By breakfast the next morning,” readers are told, “the wardroom table would be a babble of excited reminiscences about the ormolu glories of the Sule Pagoda, the decayed gentility of the Strand Hotel, the bazaars thronged with saffron-swathed monks and cheroot-puffing crones—all duly memorialized on dozens of trayfuls of Kodachrome slides and thousands of feet of eight-millimeter film.”

Weber’s narrative moves at a slow, unhurried pace, from Ricky’s youth and military service to marriage and the raising of a family. Every character is given extremely generous coverage, and every incident is fleshed out in full. Although there are occasional accidental malapropisms in the tale (one character is called “a torrid reader,” for instance, when “avid” is, one hopes, what the author had in mind), the storytelling drive never flags or flattens. Weber uses craft and insight—and a good deal of genial, often nostalgic humor—to flesh out a world, a kind of childhood and adolescence, that in many ways doesn’t exist anymore. The detailed fictional portrait of home life, first dates, deep friendships, complicated family life, and, of course, sports that the author paints is colorful and evocative throughout. Readers of a certain age will recognize many of the historical details in his story, and readers of all ages will nod at many of the insights in these pages, particularly the ones about the hopeless awkwardness of love and the quiet consolations of friendship. Weber excels at capturing such quiet moments in warm narrative tones, as when he notes: “There’s nothing more tranquilizing than settling onto a couch and having a warm child snuggle against your flank as you crack open a familiar storybook.” These episodes generally succeed in counterbalancing the one-thing-after-another tempo of the bulk of the book.

An engaging, vibrant, and heartfelt tale of a passionate man’s life and times.