Road Swing: One Fan's Journey into the Soul of American Sports » (1 MAIN ST)

STEVE RUSHIN, the author of the nonfiction books Road Swing and The Caddie Was a Reindeer, wrote a beloved weekly column called Air & Space for Sports Illustrated from 1998 to 2007. He and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, live in Connecticut with their three children.

In this alternately hilarious and insightful account, named a Best Book of 1998 by Publishers Weekly, 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 youth: 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.

Publishers Weekly

You don't have to like sports to appreciate this sidesplitting travelogue, a literary home run from Sports Illustrated's senior writer and one of the most agile essayists around. Laugh your way across America with Rushin as he follows the "perforated yellow line of the highway, like a trail of dripping nacho `cheez,' " feeding his own inner bleacher-creature while seeking out the people, places and events that define American sports and culture. Rushin is amazingly adept at wandering aimlessly without losing direction. In Austin, Minn., home of Hormel Foods, he observes, "A can of Dinty Moore beef stew... is roughly the same size and weight as a shotput, if not nearly as flavorful," and discovers to his disappointment that he's a week late for the "Spam Walk for Health." In Cleveland, Ohio, he talks to a man named Cleveland Brown about the departure of the football team with the same name. At a monster truck rally in St. Louis, Rushin affectionately compares the sound of big trucks driving over small cars to "the sound a beer can makes when collapsing against one's forehead." Rushin makes a more poignant, though no less droll, comparison at the desolate, garbage-strewn roadside tomb of "the world's greatest athlete," Jim Thorpe, in the Pennsylvania town that bought the Native American's corpse as a tourist attraction: "I couldn't stop thinking of the seventies public-service commercial in which the old Indian sheds a single tear at the sight of litter." Rushin scores a hat trick with his self-deprecating humor, eye for detail and ability to connect intimately with the reader. And read this book if for nothing else than the descriptions of motels ("La Quinta being Spanish for `next to Denny's' "). (Nov.)