Gonzo sports

Hunter S. Thompson’s work means a lot of things to a lot of different people. It can make us feel a little less lonely when we despise everyone else in the world. It can make us feel like we have someone to commiserate with when greed and political corruption make us feel like the world is ending.

And when we have an urge to shuck the world and escape into a cacophony of drugs and alcohol, we have a friend to do it with.

For me, Thompson’s sports writing, not exactly what he is known for, has been the thing I connected to most. I’m an organized and on-top-of-things kind of gal. As a graduate student, there isn’t always another option.

As such, while I enjoy the tales like “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” I connect with them in a different way. I’ve never had a bender quite like the ones Thompson describes, but I can see the portrait he is trying to paint of the human spirit, or lack thereof.

His sports writing, on the other hand, is entirely accessible. He manages to provoke an emotional response in what tends to be a subject that is largely written about in a way that purposefully tries to avoid such things.

Anyone who has read Thompson knows about his beef with former president Richard Nixon. He despised everything about the man and even dedicated his book The Great Shark Hunt to him with the tongue-in-cheek dedication “…To Richard Milhous Nixon, who never let me down.”

Thompson met Nixon once. One would think that with all of the vitriol and energy Thompson put into pulling Nixon apart, he would have a mouthful to say. However, when they met, the conversation took an entirely different turn—they talked about college football.

In this way, Thompson almost seems to recognize that sports are the great equalizer. In bringing sports into a political dialogue, Thompson throws the reader for a loop and makes him emotional whether he is a sports fan or not. It is subtlety done in the most grandiose way possible. I think the same could be said about a vast body of his work.

Thompson even talks about the darker side of sports in an engaging way. I don’t have a clue about sports betting (other than knowing that it seems fishy and involves disreputable people) but when I read the following line in “Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl,” I instantly understand the emotional impact of it:  “There is no room for mercy or the milk of human kindness in football betting—at least not when you’re prepared to get up on the edge with every dollar you own.”

In a piece he wrote on Jean-Claude Killy, a three-time Olympic medal skier, Thompson simultaneously destroys the image of the athlete as an idol and enhances Killy’s image as the driving athlete.

“[Killy] likes the carefree, hell-for-leather image that he earned as the world’s best ski racer, but nostalgia is not his bag, and his real interest now is his new commercial scene, the high-rolling world of the Money Game, where nothing is free and the amateurs are called Losers.”

Only a skilled sports writer, which Thompson most certainly was, would be able to do this with such ease and make the reader both repulsed by and in awe of Killy.

Thompson’s sports writing may not be as popular as his gonzo-style writing, but the same basic tenets are there. There is always a picture within a picture.