A FAN’S NOTES #10, The Rumpus Sports Column: Reasons to Attend the Ballgame with Your Rabbi
REASON ONE Rabbis get great seats. Or at least my brother does: for the last ten years or so, my older brother Steve has had a pulpit job at a…
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Brian Schwartz
50 posts
Brian Schwartz teaches writing at New York University. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in print publications on both coasts, and online at Ascent and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.
A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column: Is Pau Gasol Big Bird?
Pau Gasol reminds me of Big Bird. Maybe if the Lakers didn’t have bright yellow in their uniforms I wouldn’t make this connection, but with the yellow, the Sesame Street…
All that Glitters
What was it like to be Jewish, and accused of patricide, in Holocaust-era Austria?
A FAN’S NOTES: The Fantasy League
Did you hear about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball habit? Even if you don’t care much for the Beats, it’s still pretty amazing to read about how Kerouac invented his own…
The Rumpus Sports Column: Mother’s Day Bash
I turned on the Mets game yesterday—Mother’s Day—and for a moment, when the picture came in, I thought something was wrong with my TV. The umpire, I noticed, was wearing…
Rumpus Sports—The Lead-Footed Cowboy
This past week, I should have been haunting Brooklyn’s British ex-pat soccer bars, nestling myself into a corner with an afternoon pint or two, watching as the Champions League semi-finals…
A FAN’S NOTES: Play Ball
Baseball is back, and New York City, that modest little sports market, has just unveiled two new major league stadiums. This season, the Yankees will play at the shiny limestone…
A FAN’S NOTES: Beautiful Losers
My home town’s minor league hockey team went through several transformations when I was growing up. First they were called the Dusters, a name that evoked dirt roads, not slick…
A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Blog: Battling Against Castro
“In 1951 you couldn’t get us to talk politics. Ball players then would just as soon talk bed-wetting as talk politics.” These are the opening lines of Jim Shepard’s 1994…
A FAN’S NOTES— The New Rumpus Literary Sports Blog
Is there an American sportswriter alive right now who’s better than Michael Lewis? Although his long Sunday Times Magazine piece on Houston Rockets forward Shane Battier feels mildly formulaic in…
A Fan’s Notes: Literary Sports Links
Last night, Super Bowl XLIII was interrupted by a twelve-minute segment devoted exclusively to the work of an important American poet. After taking the stage at halftime in front of…