Wanted: A New History of American Sport Fiction (Reflections from 25 Years of the Sport Literature Association‪)‬

I first learned about the formation of something called the Sport Literature Association in a letter from Lyle Olsen, our spiritual and actual founder, which he sent to me as someone who had written a book on the subject. I assume that he sent essentially the same letter to Chris Messenger, Wiley Lee Umphlett, and lack Higgs (not yet a colleague, as Lyle was then at San Diego State), an invitation to an initial meeting in San Diego along with thoughts about a prospective journal. ! also assume that the books we four had written had something to do with inspiring Lyle's idea that sport literature existed as an acknowledged genre and warranted an organization to nurture it. That genre is the given of our Association, but notwithstanding the many fine books published on various aspects of sport fiction over the past twenty-five years, I have been waiting for someone--a young scholar, I assumed--to revise our overall understanding of the genre and its history. (I leave the history of sports poetry to others.) Perhaps that book is out there even as I write this, in the form of a dissertation in its early stages or a manuscript a couple of drafts away from completion. But on the chance that it is not--a very good chance, I suspect--I would like to offer members of the SLA and readers of Aethlon, if you are inclined to take up the task, some suggestions for what such a book might look like.