Toward the Sun
Collected Sports Stories
Breakaway Books, 1999
Summary
Kent Nelson lettered in six different sports in high school, played varsity ice hockey and tennis in college, along with intramural football and basketball, and, at 45, was ranked #6 in the U.S. in squash. He has also run marathons in LA, Taos, and Anchorage and has twice run the Pikes Peak Marathon, 7815 feet up and down. His sports stories are real, true, and definitive, but they are about more than sports. His characters are uncertain, troubled, and yearning. “The Squash Player” is about a man who can control the T in a squash court but can’t control the people around him. “Death Valley” explores a woman golfer’s life as she plays a round at Furnace Creek in Death Valley and finds a body in a ditch. “Projections” details the promise of a young football player but also reveals that potential does not necessarily lead to success. Nelson captures the physical demands and mental fortitude required in athletic endeavors, but also embraces his characters’ emotional lives. In “Alton’s Keeper,” a photographer and squash player in Charleston, SC, teaches his narrator friend the meaning of justice and love.
Critical Praise
“Working quietly, with very little fanfare, Kent Nelson has written as large and as accomplished a body of short fiction as anyone working today. Nowhere is his talent more evident than in his stories about sport, and so this new collection is most welcome--the exhilarating evidence of a writer at the top of his game.”
—W.D. Wetherell, author of
The Man Who Loved Levittown
“Precise, shrewd tales by a prodigiously talented but still too-little-known writer. Nelson (Language in the Blood, 1991, etc.) offers an enthralling refresher course in the exploration of character. Each of the 13 tales here use a character’s dedication (or addiction) to a sport to plumb hesitations and hopes. In “A False Encounter,” a grieving son is driven to investigate why his seemingly happy father committed suicide. The quest eventually leads him back to a group of his father’s college friends, all of them accomplished amateur boxers. The key to his father’s behavior, it turns out, is hidden in a moment of triumph in his youth when, against all expectations, he was able to rise from the canvas after a devastating blow. Such exhilarating, defining moments, Nelson suggests, both shape and haunt us. What happens when one discovers that these moments are singular and unsurpassable? The appropriately named “Death Valley— offers quite a different view of sports: a wealthy and accomplished, diffident young professional golfer visits her lover, a groundskeeper at a golf course in the California desert. Golf has helped to insulate her from the world, and her self-absorption and life of privilege are both called into question when she collides with the hard, sad lives of a group of migrant laborers camped close to the links.”Every Day a Promise” perfectly catches the unwillingness of a track champ to give up his dream of the Olympics. “The Invisible— offers a droll, somewhat mystical celebration of the way in which a star college quarterback wins back his soul from the coaches, boosters, and agents. And “The Squash Player” works out an artful variation on the theme of the aging athlete, as a man struggles to find his place in a world in which he’s no longer physically dominant. Moving, fresh, perceptive work, and further evidence of Nelson’s considerable skills.”
Quotes from Book
“He runs with such discipline, though he claims it takes no discipline to do what one truly loves. Sometimes when I wait for him at a certain spot on a trail, knowing he has to pass me, he surprises me from behind. How does he do this? When the wind is right, he can do the same to a deer. He can run silently and at full speed.”
From “Toward the Sun”
“Rachel’s asking about Alton made me think back to the photographs he’d taken of Yolanda that day at the squash court, or not to the photographs so much as that he knew she was there—she was the reason he’d got his camera out. He used Will and me as the excuse. Alton knew what to look at. That was his gift. He envisioned the larger world and believed in himself enough to love the right things. I smiled then, thinking of what I’d said afterward to Clarice—that I was not Alton’s keeper. But I was Alton’s keeper, and Yolanda’s, and they were mine.”
From "Alton's Keeper" in Toward the Sun
Sample Short Stories
Toward the Sun
Instants
Alton’s Keeper
Death Valley