What to Read Next: It's All About That Hustle
Issue #326, featuring Colson Whitehead and Keith O'Brien
Happy Friday, readers!
With basketball’s playoffs in swing — go Nuggets and Timberwolves! — and the baseball season well underway, I’ve been consuming more sports content than usual. So this week I’m featuring a couple of very fun sports books that were a pleasure to listen to during the month of April. (The majority of my non-fiction consumption this year has been via audio.)
Let’s jump right in!
Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose by Keith O’Brien
I always like to read one or two baseball books at the start of the season. Even though my interest in baseball is waning a bit, I couldn’t resist this new, well-reviewed biography of one of the most mystifying characters in American sports history.
Charlie Hustle lived up to the hype and then some. Ultimately, O’Brien gives readers a classic cautionary tale that transcends sports.
Few rises have been as unexpected or meteoric as Pete Rose’s. From his hardscrabble childhood in Cincinnati, he became a superstar for his hometown Reds. Known for hitting singles through the gap, he eventually became a three-time World Series champion and, at age 44(!), even broke the all-time record for career hits, which was previously thought to be untouchable.
Of course, that’s not the entire story. Many professional athletes gamble; the one immutable rule is to never gamble on your own sport. Pete Rose broke the cardinal rule by betting not only on his own sport, but even his own team. His expulsion from baseball in 1989 has been debated ever since.
In the hands of Keith O’Brien, this story was compulsively listenable (and fantastically narrated by Ellen Adair). The tale of Pete Rose offers a lot of material; the challenge is narrowing it down to the most important pieces. O’Brien went deep when appropriate and skimmed by big moments when they weren’t in service of the larger theme. It’s actually Rose’s later career and early post-career that was most interesting, and that’s what O’Brien gave most of his authorial attention to.
As I always appreciate in a biography, O’Brien also puts the Rose story into a modern context, which is especially valuable given the ways in which major sports leagues have embraced gambling with open arms in the last decade. The paradox is not just with Rose, but with everyone making decisions about the relationship between sports and their commercial interests (i.e., how much $$$ is going into owners’ pockets).
If you’re a sports fan, Charlie Hustle is a must-read (or must-listen). Even if you have just a passing interest, the narrative is more than good enough to keep you intrigued from start to finish.
The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death by Colson Whitehead
I’ve read a handful of Colson Whitehead’s books in the last handful of years; as I wrote in newsletter issue #319, I firmly believe he’s one of our greatest living authors. I continued my way through his catalog with his best-known non-fiction title, Noble Hustle.
In what originated as a series of articles for Grantland.com (RIP), Whitehead gives us a memorable and often dryly hilarious chronicle of his experience as an amateur competitor at the World Series of Poker.
Rather than being a serious examination, The Noble Hustle more often pokes fun at just how serious people take this “sport” and how commercialized it’s become in the last couple of decades. Instead of a fun and loose diversion to be enjoyed with friends — which is how Whitehead prefers his poker — the game has turned into just another avenue for bros to go “pro” in.
Doing some self-therapizing along the way, Whitehead muses on the archetypes of poker players, the sustenance (and sponsorship) of beef jerky, the glory of a lucky hand, and, of course, the demoralization of defeat.
On a sentence level, I just love love love Colson Whitehead. And in non-fiction form, we get even more of his wry wit and wordplay than in his fiction. Of the five books of his that I’ve read, it’s probably my least favorite, but it’s still easily 4 stars (all the others being 5 stars). If you’re a fan of Whitehead’s style, or poker in general, The Noble Hustle is not to be missed.
Thanks so much for reading. I deeply appreciate the time and inbox space.
-Jeremy
Hmmm. A different world to discover one day.
What is your favorite Whitehead book?
Thanks, Jeremy, for this spotlight on two sports books. I do read a sports-topic book from time to time, and am a baseball fan, so I'll keep these in mind. (I've read the late Roger Angell, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year, and Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit (of course!), and The Boys in the Boat.)