It’s not always jocks vs. nerds.
Jack Kerouac (Football)
After starring for his Brooklyn high school, the Beat legend went to Columbia on a full football scholarship. According to The New York Times, Kerouac was a “fast, agile fullback.” He broke his leg freshman year, though, and it was onto the Navy (and the bookshelves of aspiring bohemians everywhere) from there.
Via: Courtesy of the NYPL, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive
Albert Camus (Soccer)
The philosophical Algerian once famously wrote, “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” There were rumors Camus played goalie for the French national team, but he actually only played on a junior professional team before contracting TB and retiring.
Source: Courtesy of the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection / via: loc.gov
Vladimir Nabokov (Tennis, Soccer, Boxing)
Nabokov taught tennis and boxing in Berlin, but called soccer “the great love of my life.” He wrote affectingly about his time as a goalkeeper at Cambridge in Speak, Memory:
“Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period. I was crazy about goal keeping… Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation.”
Via: theparisreview.org
David Foster Wallace (Tennis)
Fans of the late, worshipped postmodernist knew he wrote a good deal about tennis, both in essays and in his fiction. Wallace was a self-described "near-great junior tennis player" growing up in Illinois and at age 14 was ranked 17th in the USTA Western Region and second in the narrower Central Region. Beyond junior level, though, DFW faltered. A wonderfully thorough Quora thread about his tennis prowess breaks down his gimmicky, ultimately doomed approach:
“In his essay, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,’ Wallace discusses the secret to his early success in tennis: unimaginative play in a very windy environment. Basically, Wallace would simply hit the ball back down the middle of the court, and let the strong winds of Central Illinois blow the ball into the corners.”
Via: Keith Bedford / Getty Images
