Toward the Sun
The Collected Sports Stories of Kent Nelson
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Breakaway Books, 1999