Duke Decides

Jim Wellington / Iron Duke

by John R. Tunis

Harvard track team captain Jim Wellington's determination to train and win helps him get a place on the U.S. Olympic team in the 1938 Olympic Games in Berlin

Genres: Fiction, Young Adult

260 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

John Roberts Tunis "the 'inventor' of the modern sports story",was an American writer and broadcaster. Known for his juvenile sports novels, Tunis also wrote short stories and non-fiction, including a weekly sports column for the New Yorker magazine. As a commentator Tunis was part of the first trans-Atlantic sports cast and the first broadcast of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament to the United States.

After graduating from Harvard and serving in the Army during World War I, Tunis began his writing career freelancing for American sports magazines while playing tennis in the Rivera. For the next two decades he wrote short stories and articles about sports and education for magazines including Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.

Tunis' work often protested the increasing professionalization of sports in America. He believed that amateur participation in sports taught values important for good citizenship like perseverance, fair play and equality, and that the emphasis on professional sports was turning America into a country of spectators. His sports books also tackled current social issues such as antisemitism and racial equality.

Though Tunis never considered himself a children's writer, all but one of his twenty-four books were published for juveniles; their success helped create the juvenile fiction book market in the 1940s. Books like Iron Duke (1938), All American (1942) and Keystone Kids (1943) were well received by readers and critics. Iron Duke received the New York Herald Tribune Spring Book Festival Award for best juvenile novel and was named a The Horn Book Magazine Best Book. The Child Study Association of America gave its Golden Scroll Award to Keystone Kids.

In his tribute to the writer, Bernard Hayes said "Tunis has probably made good readers of millions of young people." His success with the juvenile audience helped change the publishing industry. Along with writers like Howard Pease, his books demonstrated to publishers that there was money to be made in targeting books for teenagers. His influence went beyond simply creating a market for young adult books. "In his attempt to link sports with the communities in which they are played, he broached some highly significant issues in the literature written for and about America's youth", according to John S. Simmons in John R. Tunis and the Sports Novels for Adolescents: A Little Ahead of His Time. Tunis never considered himself a writer of boys' books, insisting his stories could be read and enjoyed by adults. He felt that the word "juvenile" was an "odious... product of a merchandising age". Despite his dislike of the term, Tunis' novels helped create and shape the juvenile fiction book market.

Reviews

[Octavia Cade · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sequel to the book I read yesterday, Iron Duke, and it's much of the same. This time, Jim is off to the Olympics, where he meets a girl and gets an unpleasant close-up look at the political side of athletics. There's a double dose of the last, as it's not only the manipulations of his national athletics association that he has to put up with. This particular Olympics is held in 1936 Berlin, and the creeping realisation that Hitler's turning that country into a mob underpins a lot of the text.

The edition I read has a somewhat defensive introduction that explains how Jim's struggles with his national association is a nutshell comparison to the wider political issues - I'm not sure that's necessary. It seems a little obvious to me, but then this book is aimed at younger readers and was first published in 1939 so perhaps, during the war years, people read it differently.

[Rebekah Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading the first book about Jim Wellington, I wanted to find out what happened next. This was a good book. It has a different style than most books. I couldn't figure out what it was in the first book, but in this one I realized that while it's all 3rd person, some scenes slip into present tense while the rest of it is past tense. A bit odd when you think about it, but it works for this story.
An unusual look not only at the 1936 Olympics in Germany, but also at what probably happened a lot in the Amateur Athletic Union. I liked Duke and agreed with his decisions.

[Ph. D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great books about sports are books that are about more than sports. This book taught 12-year-old me -- an avid athlete -- that there are things more important than athletics. Some 60 years later, it's good to be reminded of that.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Duke Decides is a 1939 novel by John R. Tunis and a sequel to the Iron Duke. It tells the story of Jim “The Duke” Wellington in his senior season at Harvard where the success of the previous year fades and he ends up as the last qualifier for the 1,500 meter race at the Berlin Olympics. Once at the Olympics he sees first-hand the totalitarian state of Nazi Germany and faces difficulties both on the track and off.

As usual Tunis takes on difficult topics like racism and anti-Semitism but one of the main themes of the book is the professional nature of sports even in the Olympics when his German competitor is essentially state sponsored and the British athletes are the only true amateurs.

I don’t think this is Tunis’ best effort but his description of Nazi Germany is a chilling precursor to the horrors of a totalitarian state. I’d recommend this to most young boys who like a sports story although they might want to read The Iron Duke or All American first.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

See my thoughts on 'The Iron Duke' and it is the same for this book (only this time he travels across the ocean by boat instead of flying).