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Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into The Soul Of America's Sports
In this alternately hilarious and insightful account, named a Best Book of 1998 by Publishers Weekly , >b>Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin uses the lens of sports to come to a deeper understanding of America.
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Steve Rushin decided to revisit the twin pursuits of his epic car trips and an unhealthy obsession with sports. So he jumped into his fully alarmed Japanese S.U.V. and drove to American sports shrines for a year, everywhere from Larry Bird's boyhood home in French Lick, Indiana, to the cornfield just outside of Dyersville, Iowa, where Field of Dreams was filmed. Now in paperback, Road Swing is the story of his journey.
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Steve Rushin decided to revisit the twin pursuits of his epic car trips and an unhealthy obsession with sports. So he jumped into his fully alarmed Japanese S.U.V. and drove to American sports shrines for a year, everywhere from Larry Bird's boyhood home in French Lick, Indiana, to the cornfield just outside of Dyersville, Iowa, where Field of Dreams was filmed. Now in paperback, Road Swing is the story of his journey.
245 pages, Paperback
First published October 20, 1998
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133 people want to read
About the author
Steve Rushin
11 books130 followersAfter graduating from Bloomington Kennedy High School in 1984 and Marquette University in 1988, Rushin joined the staff of Sports Illustrated. Over the next 19 years, he filed stories from Greenland, India, Indonesia, the Arctic Circle and other farflung locales, as well as the usual nearflung locale to which sportswriters are routinely posted.
His first novel, The Pint Man, was published by Doubleday in 2010. The Los Angeles Times called the book “Engaging, clever and often wipe-your-eyes funny.”
Rushin gave the commencement address at Marquette in 2007 and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters for “his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing.” In 2006, he was named the National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association.
A collection of his sports and travel writing—The Caddie Was a Reindeer—was published by Grove Atlantic in 2005 and was named a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The Denver Post suggested, “If you don’t end up dropping The Caddie Was a Reindeer during fits of uncontrollable merriment, it is likely you need immediate medical attention.”
A four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, Rushin has had his work anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing collections. His essays have appeared in Time magazine and The New York Times. He writes a weekly column for SI.com and is a What TK to Golf Digest.
His first book, Road Swing, published in 1998, was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” by Publishers Weekly and one of the “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time” by Sports Illustrated.
Rushin’s next book, a work of nonfiction called The Baseball Grenade, will be published by Little, Brown in 2013.
He and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, have four children and live in Connecticut.
His first novel, The Pint Man, was published by Doubleday in 2010. The Los Angeles Times called the book “Engaging, clever and often wipe-your-eyes funny.”
Rushin gave the commencement address at Marquette in 2007 and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters for “his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing.” In 2006, he was named the National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association.
A collection of his sports and travel writing—The Caddie Was a Reindeer—was published by Grove Atlantic in 2005 and was named a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. The Denver Post suggested, “If you don’t end up dropping The Caddie Was a Reindeer during fits of uncontrollable merriment, it is likely you need immediate medical attention.”
A four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, Rushin has had his work anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Travel Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing collections. His essays have appeared in Time magazine and The New York Times. He writes a weekly column for SI.com and is a What TK to Golf Digest.
His first book, Road Swing, published in 1998, was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” by Publishers Weekly and one of the “Top 100 Sports Books of All Time” by Sports Illustrated.
Rushin’s next book, a work of nonfiction called The Baseball Grenade, will be published by Little, Brown in 2013.
He and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, have four children and live in Connecticut.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 2, 2010
My review published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999:
Sportswriter's Journey Is All Over the Map
REVIEWED BY Steve Kettmann
Sunday, July 25, 1999
ROAD SWING
One Fan's Journey Into the Soul of American Sports By Steve Rushin Doubleday; 245 pages; $22.95
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's hard to find a single page in ``Road Swing'' that doesn't give a glimpse of Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin's great ear for the way real people speak, his knack for wordplay, his pungent sense of humor and his gift for moving description.
Late in a 22,000-mile car tour of the nation -- ostensibly devoted to the country's sports-obsessed psyche, but in fact much more concerned with the psyche of one 30ish sportswriter -- Rushin comes to the Grand Canyon and loses himself in awe:
``(It) is not just immense and immensely beautiful, but its depthlessness swallows all sound and moves people to whisper in its presence,'' he writes. ``The effect is profoundly relaxing, almost hypnotic. When a tour bus lurched up beside me at dusk, air brakes sighing massively, and belched out two dozen elderly Scotsmen and women on a package holiday, I, the lone American among them, couldn't help but feel proud and oddly proprietorial.''
But he's not done.
``In thirty minutes, the sky exhibited every shade of eye shadow worn by waitresses in the Southwest -- first turquoise, then blaze orange, then a kind of black-eye purple -- and twenty-five people looked on wordlessly. When the last of the light disappeared, a wee red-faced man standing near me broke the silence. `Fag's out,' sighed the Scotsman, as if the sun were the glowing tip of a cigarette now extinguished.
`` `Aye,' said the man next to him. `Aye. That was a good one, that was.' ''
It's a scene rendered so well that it becomes not only part of Rushin's memory, but part of ours, and in that there is a bond: We're standing there in Rushin's shoes, and it's not a bad view.
Writing this good almost lets one forget the odd fact that most of the book's memorable scenes -- like this one -- have nothing at all to do with sports. If Rushin and the wee red- faced man repaired to the nearest pub and swapped rugby tales into the wee red-faced hours, we never hear about it.
There's nothing wrong with a writer of Rushin's caliber letting the material take him where it will. The problem is that Rushin makes promises and doesn't deliver. He gets a lot of mileage out of his trip as an insane flourish of sports-worship, but we get too few descriptions of actual sporting events or communion with great sports spots.
Rushin shows up in Cooperstown, of course, but spends all of one page on the experience. One page. Twice he attends real games and somehow ends up in the last place one goes for a sense of what an event is all about: the press box.
The culprit in Rushin's depressing failure of perspective is not hard to identify, at least not for anyone who has spent hundreds of nights in the press box: Rushin has taken the familiar sportswriterly pose of vague disgruntlement with anything and everything and let it run away with him. Sometimes his kvetching reads like standard undergraduate sub- Hunter Thompson raving, as when he talks about how Larry Bird had always occupied a ``disproportionate number of my dwindling brain cells, which I could actually hear pop like bubble wrap with each successive day on the road.''
Sportswriters like to rip athletes for having low pain thresholds, but for someone who has been traveling professionally for years, Rushin sure sounds a lot like a scared 12-year-old wondering where Mom and Dad are. He keeps telling us how he hasn't washed his clothes (so whose fault is that?) and how he smells (thanks for sharing).
None of this would be so galling if it didn't come attached to a continual string of put-downs. The tone is set in the opening pages, when he actually rips . . . polka! He also makes cracks about . . . sprayed-on cheese! What kind of sick person, you ask, would set off on a cross- country drive if he wasn't going to dive right into enjoying Americana like polka, bad food and honky-tonks?
A sick person with a book contract, of course.
One-liners are great, but a book that claims to be journeying into the soul of American sports needs to have at least random moments of rumination on the subject here and there. This one doesn't until late in the book, when something that was sitting right there all along suddenly looks different to Rushin. That's when he offers a moving acceptance of his own family and their love of sports.
The portraits of the Rushin men together are moving, nowhere more so than in the book's final pages, when Rushin has returned home to his boyhood house to collect the mail after his odyssey has concluded.
Rushin's father, thinking about his son on the road, claims he's been hearing a phantom baseball broadcast out of nowhere every night. Rushin's brother storms in and explains the mystery by pulling open a drawer to reveal a battery-powered alarm-clock radio set to 11:17 p.m., but even then Rushin isn't ready to break the spell.
``I stayed behind for a beat and listened to the radio, powerless to the tug of a faraway ballgame being broadcast from the coast,'' he writes. ``It is possible, I discovered, for a man to feel nostalgic for a trip he concluded only an hour ago.''
It's sad Rushin needs the first pangs of nostalgia to get where he should have been much earlier: ready to burrow into the heart of America without endless belly-aching quips designed to hide the obvious (and altogether honorable) love of sports he's always felt. Maybe, at least, other sportswriters along for the ride with Rushin will find it in themselves to end the pose and admit they love what they do.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
Sportswriter's Journey Is All Over the Map
REVIEWED BY Steve Kettmann
Sunday, July 25, 1999
ROAD SWING
One Fan's Journey Into the Soul of American Sports By Steve Rushin Doubleday; 245 pages; $22.95
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's hard to find a single page in ``Road Swing'' that doesn't give a glimpse of Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin's great ear for the way real people speak, his knack for wordplay, his pungent sense of humor and his gift for moving description.
Late in a 22,000-mile car tour of the nation -- ostensibly devoted to the country's sports-obsessed psyche, but in fact much more concerned with the psyche of one 30ish sportswriter -- Rushin comes to the Grand Canyon and loses himself in awe:
``(It) is not just immense and immensely beautiful, but its depthlessness swallows all sound and moves people to whisper in its presence,'' he writes. ``The effect is profoundly relaxing, almost hypnotic. When a tour bus lurched up beside me at dusk, air brakes sighing massively, and belched out two dozen elderly Scotsmen and women on a package holiday, I, the lone American among them, couldn't help but feel proud and oddly proprietorial.''
But he's not done.
``In thirty minutes, the sky exhibited every shade of eye shadow worn by waitresses in the Southwest -- first turquoise, then blaze orange, then a kind of black-eye purple -- and twenty-five people looked on wordlessly. When the last of the light disappeared, a wee red-faced man standing near me broke the silence. `Fag's out,' sighed the Scotsman, as if the sun were the glowing tip of a cigarette now extinguished.
`` `Aye,' said the man next to him. `Aye. That was a good one, that was.' ''
It's a scene rendered so well that it becomes not only part of Rushin's memory, but part of ours, and in that there is a bond: We're standing there in Rushin's shoes, and it's not a bad view.
Writing this good almost lets one forget the odd fact that most of the book's memorable scenes -- like this one -- have nothing at all to do with sports. If Rushin and the wee red- faced man repaired to the nearest pub and swapped rugby tales into the wee red-faced hours, we never hear about it.
There's nothing wrong with a writer of Rushin's caliber letting the material take him where it will. The problem is that Rushin makes promises and doesn't deliver. He gets a lot of mileage out of his trip as an insane flourish of sports-worship, but we get too few descriptions of actual sporting events or communion with great sports spots.
Rushin shows up in Cooperstown, of course, but spends all of one page on the experience. One page. Twice he attends real games and somehow ends up in the last place one goes for a sense of what an event is all about: the press box.
The culprit in Rushin's depressing failure of perspective is not hard to identify, at least not for anyone who has spent hundreds of nights in the press box: Rushin has taken the familiar sportswriterly pose of vague disgruntlement with anything and everything and let it run away with him. Sometimes his kvetching reads like standard undergraduate sub- Hunter Thompson raving, as when he talks about how Larry Bird had always occupied a ``disproportionate number of my dwindling brain cells, which I could actually hear pop like bubble wrap with each successive day on the road.''
Sportswriters like to rip athletes for having low pain thresholds, but for someone who has been traveling professionally for years, Rushin sure sounds a lot like a scared 12-year-old wondering where Mom and Dad are. He keeps telling us how he hasn't washed his clothes (so whose fault is that?) and how he smells (thanks for sharing).
None of this would be so galling if it didn't come attached to a continual string of put-downs. The tone is set in the opening pages, when he actually rips . . . polka! He also makes cracks about . . . sprayed-on cheese! What kind of sick person, you ask, would set off on a cross- country drive if he wasn't going to dive right into enjoying Americana like polka, bad food and honky-tonks?
A sick person with a book contract, of course.
One-liners are great, but a book that claims to be journeying into the soul of American sports needs to have at least random moments of rumination on the subject here and there. This one doesn't until late in the book, when something that was sitting right there all along suddenly looks different to Rushin. That's when he offers a moving acceptance of his own family and their love of sports.
The portraits of the Rushin men together are moving, nowhere more so than in the book's final pages, when Rushin has returned home to his boyhood house to collect the mail after his odyssey has concluded.
Rushin's father, thinking about his son on the road, claims he's been hearing a phantom baseball broadcast out of nowhere every night. Rushin's brother storms in and explains the mystery by pulling open a drawer to reveal a battery-powered alarm-clock radio set to 11:17 p.m., but even then Rushin isn't ready to break the spell.
``I stayed behind for a beat and listened to the radio, powerless to the tug of a faraway ballgame being broadcast from the coast,'' he writes. ``It is possible, I discovered, for a man to feel nostalgic for a trip he concluded only an hour ago.''
It's sad Rushin needs the first pangs of nostalgia to get where he should have been much earlier: ready to burrow into the heart of America without endless belly-aching quips designed to hide the obvious (and altogether honorable) love of sports he's always felt. Maybe, at least, other sportswriters along for the ride with Rushin will find it in themselves to end the pose and admit they love what they do.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
October 7, 2007
Other than Bob Greene, this is the author I aspire to be. Rushin, a Sports Illustrated columnist, travels around the U.S. looking for the heart of sports. Each incident is fresh and Rushin doesn't lose patience with his writing. I was impressed with his take on Little Rock. In Road Swing, he wrote that he got lost trying to get back on the interstate. While driving under the freeway, he noticed a basketball game being played under an overpass. The sounds of the cars overhead, he wrote, sounded like cheers. I, too, get turned around in Little Rock at times when trying to hit I-30 from downtown. I stumbled across the court he was referring to and his description was perfect. Great writer. Quit reading this blather and get his book!
May 25, 2020
4 / 5
A laugh out loud funny journey through sports, America, and American sports.
A laugh out loud funny journey through sports, America, and American sports.
January 30, 2008
I am not too much into sports, but I really enjoyed this book. Steve Rushin is very funny!
May 6, 2010
Rushin's writing is immensely satisfying to anyone who loves sports, humor AND language.
March 6, 2024
Sports Illustrated writer’s tour of the U.S. and it’s sports shrines contains the author’s usual humor as he seeks out the famous and little known, but it feels dated a quarter century later with so many changes in professional sports and in technology. Sadly, he also follows the lead of so many Northeast corridor writers in painting the Southern states he passed through as places where cars sit on blocks, people are toothless and, oh, gee, the people talk funny. One would hope he wouldn’t write that in 2024. Overall, a decent look back at sports in the late 1990s.
August 1, 2019
Steve Rushin has long been one of my favorite sportswriters but I didn’t know about this book, published in 1998, until recently. He never disappoints with his dry wit, love of language and use of words. Rushin’s writing makes me laugh out loud but also manages to tug at my heart-strings towards the end of the book describing his childhood love of Alan Page—he brought me to tears. If you love sports and road trips, this book is for you!
August 20, 2024
Rushin's discussion of American culture is an excellent read for those who wish to be steeped in the mystique of sports entertainment. Although much of his discussion is rooted in the time he goes on his journey, Rushin essentially the entirety of American sports. His anecdotes are appreciated, although, without the life experience he had, I was left a bit confused. Still, all is naturally forgiven considering the book was published before I was born.
August 3, 2025
Probably 3.5 starts. A quick, entertaining, healthy dose of sports America a, peppered with tongue-in-cheek humor. My brother bought this book for me about 20!years ago. He knows my sense of humor, as well as our shared love of sports.
February 28, 2021
This book was fun to read because it reminded me of my own childhood-spending summers traveling in the car across the country taking in ballgames and tourist attractions. A fun read.
January 31, 2022
Funny, light-hearted, and filled with interesting sports nuggets.
This is the kind of trip I should’ve taken as a bachelor.
This is the kind of trip I should’ve taken as a bachelor.
May 5, 2010
Steve Rushin is a sports writer who spent the better part of a year traveling around the United States visiting just about every sports "hot spot" that you can think of. The consummate sports fanatic, Rushin doesn't leave any major sport out, visiting every "hall of fame" there is, and even giving a shout-out to my beloved soccer, which at the time this book was researched (around 96-97, I think) had yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. (it has since).
The book had a bit of a rushed feel that I found somewhat unpleasant. It's almost like he just drove past most of the places he visited while looking out the window and barely had anything to say about them. I guess I would have preferred quality over quantity. I also don't think he quite finished his "it's about fathers and sons" thesis has cohesively as he could have.
Still, I enjoyed it. I was particularly amused to read mentions of Brett Favre and Peyton Manning, who, some 12 years after this book was released, are still big names in sports.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who isn't a big sports fans. Non-fanatics will probably be bored to tears, but you fanatics like me will get a kick out of it.
The book had a bit of a rushed feel that I found somewhat unpleasant. It's almost like he just drove past most of the places he visited while looking out the window and barely had anything to say about them. I guess I would have preferred quality over quantity. I also don't think he quite finished his "it's about fathers and sons" thesis has cohesively as he could have.
Still, I enjoyed it. I was particularly amused to read mentions of Brett Favre and Peyton Manning, who, some 12 years after this book was released, are still big names in sports.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who isn't a big sports fans. Non-fanatics will probably be bored to tears, but you fanatics like me will get a kick out of it.
June 6, 2012
In't kort: De ondertitel zegt het zelf: "Travels through Sporting America''. Rushin, een senior-writer voor Sports Illustrated, start in zijn woonplaats Minneapolis een rondreis doorheen de Verenigde Staten, waarbij hij zich verwondert, verbaast, ergert en watnogmeer over hoe Amerikanen met sport omgaan en wat het voor hen betekent.
Mijn oordeel: het doet verbazend veel denken aan 'The Lost Continent' van Bill Bryson, maar dan met de focus op de sport. Een andere invalshoek, maar daarom zeker geen slechtere. Maar om hiervan ten volle te kunnen genieten moet je of Amerikaan en sportliefhebber zijn, of helemaal Amerikaans sportgek. Het gaat zelfs mijn petje af en toe te boven. Toch doet Rushin je minstens op elke bladzijde even glimlachen. Esquire noemde het 'a riotous read', en daar moet ik hen gelijk in geven.
Eindoordeel: ****
Mijn oordeel: het doet verbazend veel denken aan 'The Lost Continent' van Bill Bryson, maar dan met de focus op de sport. Een andere invalshoek, maar daarom zeker geen slechtere. Maar om hiervan ten volle te kunnen genieten moet je of Amerikaan en sportliefhebber zijn, of helemaal Amerikaans sportgek. Het gaat zelfs mijn petje af en toe te boven. Toch doet Rushin je minstens op elke bladzijde even glimlachen. Esquire noemde het 'a riotous read', en daar moet ik hen gelijk in geven.
Eindoordeel: ****
October 2, 2018
Steve Rushin has written a warm funny combination road trip and extended reflection on the state of sports today. Actually it is about the state of sports in 1998, so while it is witty and enjoyable, it is a tad dated. Rushin spent a year driving around the country looking for the soul of American sports fandom. He is not looking to comment on the state of the NBA or NFL, he wants to know what ordinary people feel when they participate in sports. So whether it is as heartbroken Browns fans mourning the loss of their team, or a professional billiard players thinking they deserve more air time, these are his focus. I would like to have read his thoughts about major sports events but that is Rushin's day job. Here he is looking for the quirky, the offbeat and the authentic.
May 9, 2008
Rushin takes a swing at a Charles Kuraltesque book and mostly connects. His musings are always fun (even when they were overwritten in his SI columns) and he did enough legwork here to have some fun and let the legwork do most of the oddball amusement. The one donwfall? He shortchanges the western half of the U.S. Not OK, in my book.
March 21, 2015
Inconsistent, trite, and under-developed. I was looking forward to reading this; Rushin's work in SI had always been solid, but I left disappointed. There are a few glimpses of heartfelt sportswriting + Americana - the Lou Groza interview is very good - but for the most part, this reads like Stephen Fry, not Buzz Bissinger.
July 21, 2011
Nice easy read. It is getting a little dated (written in mid 1990s), but I enjoyed it. There were some laugh out loud moments. It was more about sports in general than baseball than I had thought.
September 5, 2013
Though I love Steve Rushin's writing and his prose at the end almost swayed me to 3 stars, this book published in 1998 is laughably dated and just does not hold up ten (or more) years later.
October 6, 2010
I got bored about halfway through.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews