Close Modal

Dispatches from the Sporting Life

Paperback
$19.95 US
5.19"W x 8.01"H x 0.81"D   (13.2 x 20.3 x 2.1 cm) | 11 oz (299 g) | 24 per carton
On sale May 27, 2003 | 320 Pages | 9780676974782
Sales rights: Canada and Open Mkt
Mordecai Richler’s final book pays homage to his personal heroes and celebrates a writer’s love of sport with his trademark irascibility, humour and acuity.

Even while writing his bestselling novels, Mordecai Richler nurtured his obsession with sports, writing brilliantly on ice hockey, baseball, salmon fishing, bodybuilding, and wrestling for such publications as GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Inside Sports, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Mordecai himself chose the pieces to include in Dispatches from the Sporting Life, and together they give us an intimate portrait of a man who admired the players and prized the struggle of sport—as much as he enjoyed skewering those who made a mockery of its principles.

His encounters with Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe (“Mr. Elbows... the big guy with the ginger-ale bottle shoulders”) are by turns bizarre, moving and uproarious. Richler travelled with Guy LaFleur’s Montreal Canadiens (“Les Canadiens sont là!”), but also with the “far-from-incomparable” Trail Smoke Eaters to Stockholm for the world hockey championships, where Canadians are “widely known, and widely disliked.”

There are wonderful pieces here about Ring Lardner, George Plimpton, Hank Greenberg and lady umpires, and a marvellous essay on his unlimited enthusiasm for the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, which includes among its champions Sandy Koufax, “who may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as well as one Steve Allan Hertz, an infielder who played five total games in Houston in 1964 and had a batting average of .000.
Foreword by Noah Richler

In 1972, my father brought his family back to Canada after nearly twenty years in England. I learned in no time that his preferred place on Saturday nights from September to May was on the living room couch, watching Hockey Night in Canada.

We returned to Canada in the country’s prime time, you might say. The Canadian dollar was on par with the American (a detail that matters, when it comes to international leagues), and though Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque were sparring from their federal and provincial prime ministers’ offices, the Péquistes had not yet driven a stake through Montreal’s cosmopolitan heart. Montreal was a city on top of the world, rich with memories and history, but an avenir too. There was no question, in my father’s mind, that it was the only city in Canada where he could possibly live: the most sophisticated -- which meant, for him, the best restaurants, the most critical and interesting politics and, at the Forum, the chance to watch the Montreal Canadiens -- the Habs -- playing before the most knowledgeable and demanding hockey crowd in North America.

Twelve years old, I received swift instruction in matters Canadian. My father’s love of sports, I quickly saw, was entirely wrapped up in the urban landscape of his childhood: the cold-water flats of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, east of Park and north of Pine, bounded to one side by the well-to-do French Canadians of Outremont and on the other by the francophone working class of the Plateau. Baseball at Delorimier Downs and hockey at the Forum were what Montreal Jews and French Canadians had in common. During the summer, Pa showed me what the bleachers were at Jarry Park, and introduced me to baseball’s ritual of the seventh-inning stretch. Then, that September, we watched an overweight Team Canada, fresh off the links, face off against Russia, an opponent the NHL’s professionals famously failed to take seriously. It fast became the most extraordinary international hockey series Canada has ever played. The Cold War still on, the Red Army was what the West feared then, but in Canada we held them in awe for a different reason: soldiers who played crisp, mesmerizing, “amateur” hockey -- full-time. All Canadians of my generation can hum the grand Soviet anthem as a consequence. We feel a kinship there. We know where we were when Paul Henderson scored, saving face for Canada, and we remember the shock we felt when, after Team Canada scored the first goal of the series in Montreal, the Russians stormed back to win the game 7 - 3.

I was watching the game with my father that evening, all the family in the living room, Pa’s enthrallment palpable. After that series ended, my father took me to the Forum to see the Canadiens, who beat Minnesota 3 - 0 in an early season NHL game. I was thrilled to be with him, of course, in the building that I knew meant so much to him, but we’d been spoiled by the match with the Soviets: the hockey was somnambulant by comparison.

The Canadiens, at the time, were on their way to becoming the winningest franchise in professional sports, no mean achievement. By the end of the decade, they’d have won more Stanley Cups than the Yankees had World Series, or Liverpool FC had carried football trophies back to Merseyside. They were unquestionably the best -- and they belonged to us. Quebeckers many of them, Canadians certainly. The Habs of the 1970s went on to establish themselves as the second most powerful dynasty in the team’s history, losing perhaps eight to ten games a season -- a couple of them from sheer boredom. The first, setting the bar for my father, had won five Stanley Cups in a row from 1956 to 1960. That was the team Pa got to call Nos Glorieux. The Canadiens, for his generation and mine, were a thrilling, easy team to support.

My father the fan, however, was also something of a fatalist, inclined to moments of deep foreboding. The team down one or, just occasionally, two goals at the end of the first period, he’d pronounce on their sloppiness from his uncontested position on the couch: “We’re in trouble now,” he’d say -- before, more often than not, the Canadiens dug themselves out of it. It was, I suppose, the mark of the writer in him, someone who did not expect things to go swimmingly for long.

Come the late eighties, after yet more league expansion, after the owners’ and the players’ greed turned the game into a television spectacle, the play stopping every few minutes for another commercial break, my father lost interest in hockey. He stopped going to games because -- he would never have imagined it -- he was often bored at the rink. Pa frowned every time a new Canadiens team, its meagre talent stretched too thin, would dump the puck forward and race on in. This was not the game he grew up with, and by the nineties he’d given up on it entirely.

By then, a string of Péquiste victories had taken its toll, and the dollar was in freefall. Trudeau was no longer a figure in public life, and a huge number of anglophone Montrealers had left the province -- though not my father, stubbornly. The Canadiens had been relegated to a shameful box of an arena built by the Molsons, their indifferent last Canadian proprietors; the Expos had been languishing in the horrid Olympic Stadium for more than two decades, playing to the smallest attendances in the National League.

Too many Montreal institutions gone.

Pa’s sports were not, as games are for so many fans these days, vessels for statistics or of contrived corporate competition -- a city’s glory purchased by some conglomerate churning money at the gate. Nor was the game, as Pa writes, the place for “intellectual gibberish” -- a tableau for some eclectic, European, Umberto Eco-like reduction of philosophical life. It was, instead, a very real matter. It was about getting ahead, about making your way in the world -- as a Canadian. No, we can be more specific than that: as a Montrealer, of the non-WASP kind, during the time that city was original and great.

Pa was serious in his allegiances: hockey in winter, and baseball in summer. Snooker, year-round, was something he could relax to -- playing, or watching the sport on television, after his working day was done. Fishing, a pastime he undertook later in life, was, I suspect, a pursuit that had more to do with a feeling of having arrived -- as well as his love of the Canadian outdoors, an attribute of my father’s writing that is often underestimated. It’s there in Barney’s Version, and in the a mari usque ad mare romp of Solomon Gursky Was Here -- and, of course, in Duddy Kravitz’s dream of purchasing all the properties bordering a Laurentian lake. The love of sports had, most of all, to do with home. In all those years in London, cricket, soccer, rugby -- they just didn’t figure. Hockey and baseball were part of the patrimony in ways those sports could never be. What the journalism offered, those forays into Gordie Howe’s garage or to a bodybuilding convention, was the chance to get away from the typewriter and drop in on lives other than his own. One of the unusual complaints my father would sometimes make is that his literary success had come too soon. He’d not had to work in an office or hold down a factory job to get by, so he’d lost out on the material those experiences might have supplied him. The sports assignments helped satisfy that necessary, writer’s curiosity.
“Richler scores from the grave with sports book. . . .This book’s selections, handpicked by Richler himself . . . reveal his fondness for fishing and hockey and his obsession with baseball. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a worthy read and a fine examination of one man’s enduring passion.” —The Observer

“It’s one last bit of Richler, one more chunk of tart prose to savour this summer while grieving the sad fact that there will be no more novels. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a personal postscript from Richler, a reminder that behind the acerbic wit was a warm family man, a sports fan like many ordinary men whose allegiances were formed in the hot enthusiasms of youth but frayed in old age by the cold realities of the sports business. . . . And it is as a fan that he wrote these essays. . . . The greatest hockey player of all time [Gordie Howe] decides to sell Amway as he retires, and Mordecai Richler, one of the greatest satirists of our time, leaves the room with a full ammunition clip. . . . This moment alone is worth the price of admission.” —The Chronicle-Herald

“The best stories in this collection are like the best of Richler’s fiction.” —Ottawa Citizen

Dispatches reflects Richler’s passion for sports. . . . Richler combines the enthusiasm of a fan with the curiosity and insight of a first-rate reporter. Add to the mix the prose skills of an accomplished novelist with the wry, mordant wit of a satirist and you end up with sports writing of a high order.” —The Hamilton Spectator

"Canada lost more than a top-shelf novelist when Mordecai Richler died last summer; it also lost its last true man of letters. . . . The same vigilant irony, the same stoical humour, the same vibrant language, all are omnipresent in everything he put his name to. Meaning that you’re probably better off re-reading Richler on Guy Lafleur than persevering through this season’s bright new light of fiction wrestling with the eternal verities. . . . The real appeal of Dispatches from the Sporting Life lies in the previously uncollected pieces. Connoisseurs of Richler’s prose will be pleased to discover hard-to-find items from Signature, Inside Sports, GQ, and The New York Times Sports Magazine together in one tidy place. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a nice start at getting Canada’s greatest writer’s non-fictional house in order.” —The Globe and Mail

“Laced with Richler’s senses of irony and wit on subjects from the sporting world.” —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

“It’s a Richler classic. . . . A wonderful selection . . . as achievements go, it’s right up there with pitching a no-hitter in the World Series.” —Joel Yanofsky, The Gazette (Montreal)

“With economy, wit and flair, Richler shows how it’s done. The man’s style is always evident, whether he’s failing to catch salmon in Scotland or rooting on the hapless Habs. . . . Stylish sports essays from a master. . . . Like its namesake, the typeface is immensely readable.” —The Calgary Herald

“Mordecai Richler’s 30 years of sports writing brims with insight and nuance. . . . Richler’s unpretentiousness and willingness to take the air out of anyone and anything—himself included—make him an especially Canadian treasure.” —Quill & Quire

“This collection conveys the passion of a lifelong observer and fan holding up the ideals of sport even as he saw those principles being tarnished by people who should have known better. . . . A fun read . . . tempered here by Richler’s characteristic wit, inimitable voice and cogent argument. . . . [Dispatches from the Sporting Life] should be required reading for some of today’s sports poobahs, the ones holding court in the box seats high above the action.” —Toronto Star

Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a worthy read and a fine examination of one man’s enduring passion.” —Peterborough Examiner

“It is a treat . . . to have a set of such vintage Richler in one attractive volume. The book is razor-sharp, highly amusing, informative, and, at times, laugh-aloud funny. It is not surprising that Richler is so missed." —London Free Press
© Jillian Edelstein
Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal in 1931.  Among his most successful novels are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version.  He died in 2001. View titles by Mordecai Richler
Available for sale exclusive:
•     Canada

Available for sale non-exclusive:
•     Afghanistan
•     Aland Islands
•     Albania
•     Algeria
•     Andorra
•     Angola
•     Anguilla
•     Antarctica
•     Argentina
•     Armenia
•     Aruba
•     Austria
•     Azerbaijan
•     Bahrain
•     Belarus
•     Belgium
•     Benin
•     Bhutan
•     Bolivia
•     Bonaire, Saba
•     Bosnia Herzeg.
•     Bouvet Island
•     Brazil
•     Bulgaria
•     Burkina Faso
•     Burundi
•     Cambodia
•     Cameroon
•     Cape Verde
•     Centr.Afr.Rep.
•     Chad
•     Chile
•     China
•     Colombia
•     Comoro Is.
•     Congo
•     Cook Islands
•     Costa Rica
•     Croatia
•     Cuba
•     Curacao
•     Czech Republic
•     Dem. Rep. Congo
•     Denmark
•     Djibouti
•     Dominican Rep.
•     Ecuador
•     Egypt
•     El Salvador
•     Equatorial Gui.
•     Eritrea
•     Estonia
•     Ethiopia
•     Faroe Islands
•     Finland
•     France
•     Fren.Polynesia
•     French Guinea
•     Gabon
•     Georgia
•     Germany
•     Greece
•     Greenland
•     Guadeloupe
•     Guatemala
•     Guinea Republic
•     Guinea-Bissau
•     Haiti
•     Heard/McDon.Isl
•     Honduras
•     Hong Kong
•     Hungary
•     Iceland
•     Indonesia
•     Iran
•     Iraq
•     Israel
•     Italy
•     Ivory Coast
•     Japan
•     Jordan
•     Kazakhstan
•     Kuwait
•     Kyrgyzstan
•     Laos
•     Latvia
•     Lebanon
•     Liberia
•     Libya
•     Liechtenstein
•     Lithuania
•     Luxembourg
•     Macau
•     Macedonia
•     Madagascar
•     Maldives
•     Mali
•     Marshall island
•     Martinique
•     Mauritania
•     Mayotte
•     Mexico
•     Micronesia
•     Moldavia
•     Monaco
•     Mongolia
•     Montenegro
•     Morocco
•     Myanmar
•     Nepal
•     Netherlands
•     New Caledonia
•     Nicaragua
•     Niger
•     Niue
•     Norfolk Island
•     North Korea
•     Norway
•     Oman
•     Palau
•     Palestinian Ter
•     Panama
•     Paraguay
•     Peru
•     Philippines
•     Poland
•     Portugal
•     Qatar
•     Reunion Island
•     Romania
•     Russian Fed.
•     Rwanda
•     Saint Martin
•     San Marino
•     SaoTome Princip
•     Saudi Arabia
•     Senegal
•     Serbia
•     Singapore
•     Sint Maarten
•     Slovakia
•     Slovenia
•     South Korea
•     South Sudan
•     Spain
•     St Barthelemy
•     St.Pier,Miquel.
•     Sth Terr. Franc
•     Sudan
•     Suriname
•     Svalbard
•     Sweden
•     Switzerland
•     Syria
•     Tadschikistan
•     Taiwan
•     Thailand
•     Timor-Leste
•     Togo
•     Tokelau Islands
•     Tunisia
•     Turkey
•     Turkmenistan
•     Ukraine
•     Unit.Arab Emir.
•     Uruguay
•     Uzbekistan
•     Vatican City
•     Venezuela
•     Vietnam
•     Wallis,Futuna
•     West Saharan
•     Western Samoa
•     Yemen

Not available for sale:
•     Antigua/Barbuda
•     Australia
•     Bahamas
•     Bangladesh
•     Barbados
•     Belize
•     Bermuda
•     Botswana
•     Brit.Ind.Oc.Ter
•     Brit.Virgin Is.
•     Brunei
•     Cayman Islands
•     Christmas Islnd
•     Cocos Islands
•     Cyprus
•     Dominica
•     Falkland Islnds
•     Fiji
•     Gambia
•     Ghana
•     Gibraltar
•     Grenada
•     Guam
•     Guernsey
•     Guyana
•     India
•     Ireland
•     Isle of Man
•     Jamaica
•     Jersey
•     Kenya
•     Kiribati
•     Lesotho
•     Malawi
•     Malaysia
•     Malta
•     Mauritius
•     Minor Outl.Ins.
•     Montserrat
•     Mozambique
•     Namibia
•     Nauru
•     New Zealand
•     Nigeria
•     North Mariana
•     Pakistan
•     PapuaNewGuinea
•     Pitcairn Islnds
•     Puerto Rico
•     S. Sandwich Ins
•     Samoa,American
•     Seychelles
•     Sierra Leone
•     Solomon Islands
•     Somalia
•     South Africa
•     Sri Lanka
•     St. Helena
•     St. Lucia
•     St. Vincent
•     St.Chr.,Nevis
•     Swaziland
•     Tanzania
•     Tonga
•     Trinidad,Tobago
•     Turks&Caicos Is
•     Tuvalu
•     US Virgin Is.
•     USA
•     Uganda
•     United Kingdom
•     Vanuatu
•     Zambia
•     Zimbabwe

About

Mordecai Richler’s final book pays homage to his personal heroes and celebrates a writer’s love of sport with his trademark irascibility, humour and acuity.

Even while writing his bestselling novels, Mordecai Richler nurtured his obsession with sports, writing brilliantly on ice hockey, baseball, salmon fishing, bodybuilding, and wrestling for such publications as GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Inside Sports, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Mordecai himself chose the pieces to include in Dispatches from the Sporting Life, and together they give us an intimate portrait of a man who admired the players and prized the struggle of sport—as much as he enjoyed skewering those who made a mockery of its principles.

His encounters with Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe (“Mr. Elbows... the big guy with the ginger-ale bottle shoulders”) are by turns bizarre, moving and uproarious. Richler travelled with Guy LaFleur’s Montreal Canadiens (“Les Canadiens sont là!”), but also with the “far-from-incomparable” Trail Smoke Eaters to Stockholm for the world hockey championships, where Canadians are “widely known, and widely disliked.”

There are wonderful pieces here about Ring Lardner, George Plimpton, Hank Greenberg and lady umpires, and a marvellous essay on his unlimited enthusiasm for the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, which includes among its champions Sandy Koufax, “who may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as well as one Steve Allan Hertz, an infielder who played five total games in Houston in 1964 and had a batting average of .000.

Excerpt

Foreword by Noah Richler

In 1972, my father brought his family back to Canada after nearly twenty years in England. I learned in no time that his preferred place on Saturday nights from September to May was on the living room couch, watching Hockey Night in Canada.

We returned to Canada in the country’s prime time, you might say. The Canadian dollar was on par with the American (a detail that matters, when it comes to international leagues), and though Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque were sparring from their federal and provincial prime ministers’ offices, the Péquistes had not yet driven a stake through Montreal’s cosmopolitan heart. Montreal was a city on top of the world, rich with memories and history, but an avenir too. There was no question, in my father’s mind, that it was the only city in Canada where he could possibly live: the most sophisticated -- which meant, for him, the best restaurants, the most critical and interesting politics and, at the Forum, the chance to watch the Montreal Canadiens -- the Habs -- playing before the most knowledgeable and demanding hockey crowd in North America.

Twelve years old, I received swift instruction in matters Canadian. My father’s love of sports, I quickly saw, was entirely wrapped up in the urban landscape of his childhood: the cold-water flats of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, east of Park and north of Pine, bounded to one side by the well-to-do French Canadians of Outremont and on the other by the francophone working class of the Plateau. Baseball at Delorimier Downs and hockey at the Forum were what Montreal Jews and French Canadians had in common. During the summer, Pa showed me what the bleachers were at Jarry Park, and introduced me to baseball’s ritual of the seventh-inning stretch. Then, that September, we watched an overweight Team Canada, fresh off the links, face off against Russia, an opponent the NHL’s professionals famously failed to take seriously. It fast became the most extraordinary international hockey series Canada has ever played. The Cold War still on, the Red Army was what the West feared then, but in Canada we held them in awe for a different reason: soldiers who played crisp, mesmerizing, “amateur” hockey -- full-time. All Canadians of my generation can hum the grand Soviet anthem as a consequence. We feel a kinship there. We know where we were when Paul Henderson scored, saving face for Canada, and we remember the shock we felt when, after Team Canada scored the first goal of the series in Montreal, the Russians stormed back to win the game 7 - 3.

I was watching the game with my father that evening, all the family in the living room, Pa’s enthrallment palpable. After that series ended, my father took me to the Forum to see the Canadiens, who beat Minnesota 3 - 0 in an early season NHL game. I was thrilled to be with him, of course, in the building that I knew meant so much to him, but we’d been spoiled by the match with the Soviets: the hockey was somnambulant by comparison.

The Canadiens, at the time, were on their way to becoming the winningest franchise in professional sports, no mean achievement. By the end of the decade, they’d have won more Stanley Cups than the Yankees had World Series, or Liverpool FC had carried football trophies back to Merseyside. They were unquestionably the best -- and they belonged to us. Quebeckers many of them, Canadians certainly. The Habs of the 1970s went on to establish themselves as the second most powerful dynasty in the team’s history, losing perhaps eight to ten games a season -- a couple of them from sheer boredom. The first, setting the bar for my father, had won five Stanley Cups in a row from 1956 to 1960. That was the team Pa got to call Nos Glorieux. The Canadiens, for his generation and mine, were a thrilling, easy team to support.

My father the fan, however, was also something of a fatalist, inclined to moments of deep foreboding. The team down one or, just occasionally, two goals at the end of the first period, he’d pronounce on their sloppiness from his uncontested position on the couch: “We’re in trouble now,” he’d say -- before, more often than not, the Canadiens dug themselves out of it. It was, I suppose, the mark of the writer in him, someone who did not expect things to go swimmingly for long.

Come the late eighties, after yet more league expansion, after the owners’ and the players’ greed turned the game into a television spectacle, the play stopping every few minutes for another commercial break, my father lost interest in hockey. He stopped going to games because -- he would never have imagined it -- he was often bored at the rink. Pa frowned every time a new Canadiens team, its meagre talent stretched too thin, would dump the puck forward and race on in. This was not the game he grew up with, and by the nineties he’d given up on it entirely.

By then, a string of Péquiste victories had taken its toll, and the dollar was in freefall. Trudeau was no longer a figure in public life, and a huge number of anglophone Montrealers had left the province -- though not my father, stubbornly. The Canadiens had been relegated to a shameful box of an arena built by the Molsons, their indifferent last Canadian proprietors; the Expos had been languishing in the horrid Olympic Stadium for more than two decades, playing to the smallest attendances in the National League.

Too many Montreal institutions gone.

Pa’s sports were not, as games are for so many fans these days, vessels for statistics or of contrived corporate competition -- a city’s glory purchased by some conglomerate churning money at the gate. Nor was the game, as Pa writes, the place for “intellectual gibberish” -- a tableau for some eclectic, European, Umberto Eco-like reduction of philosophical life. It was, instead, a very real matter. It was about getting ahead, about making your way in the world -- as a Canadian. No, we can be more specific than that: as a Montrealer, of the non-WASP kind, during the time that city was original and great.

Pa was serious in his allegiances: hockey in winter, and baseball in summer. Snooker, year-round, was something he could relax to -- playing, or watching the sport on television, after his working day was done. Fishing, a pastime he undertook later in life, was, I suspect, a pursuit that had more to do with a feeling of having arrived -- as well as his love of the Canadian outdoors, an attribute of my father’s writing that is often underestimated. It’s there in Barney’s Version, and in the a mari usque ad mare romp of Solomon Gursky Was Here -- and, of course, in Duddy Kravitz’s dream of purchasing all the properties bordering a Laurentian lake. The love of sports had, most of all, to do with home. In all those years in London, cricket, soccer, rugby -- they just didn’t figure. Hockey and baseball were part of the patrimony in ways those sports could never be. What the journalism offered, those forays into Gordie Howe’s garage or to a bodybuilding convention, was the chance to get away from the typewriter and drop in on lives other than his own. One of the unusual complaints my father would sometimes make is that his literary success had come too soon. He’d not had to work in an office or hold down a factory job to get by, so he’d lost out on the material those experiences might have supplied him. The sports assignments helped satisfy that necessary, writer’s curiosity.

Praise

“Richler scores from the grave with sports book. . . .This book’s selections, handpicked by Richler himself . . . reveal his fondness for fishing and hockey and his obsession with baseball. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a worthy read and a fine examination of one man’s enduring passion.” —The Observer

“It’s one last bit of Richler, one more chunk of tart prose to savour this summer while grieving the sad fact that there will be no more novels. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a personal postscript from Richler, a reminder that behind the acerbic wit was a warm family man, a sports fan like many ordinary men whose allegiances were formed in the hot enthusiasms of youth but frayed in old age by the cold realities of the sports business. . . . And it is as a fan that he wrote these essays. . . . The greatest hockey player of all time [Gordie Howe] decides to sell Amway as he retires, and Mordecai Richler, one of the greatest satirists of our time, leaves the room with a full ammunition clip. . . . This moment alone is worth the price of admission.” —The Chronicle-Herald

“The best stories in this collection are like the best of Richler’s fiction.” —Ottawa Citizen

Dispatches reflects Richler’s passion for sports. . . . Richler combines the enthusiasm of a fan with the curiosity and insight of a first-rate reporter. Add to the mix the prose skills of an accomplished novelist with the wry, mordant wit of a satirist and you end up with sports writing of a high order.” —The Hamilton Spectator

"Canada lost more than a top-shelf novelist when Mordecai Richler died last summer; it also lost its last true man of letters. . . . The same vigilant irony, the same stoical humour, the same vibrant language, all are omnipresent in everything he put his name to. Meaning that you’re probably better off re-reading Richler on Guy Lafleur than persevering through this season’s bright new light of fiction wrestling with the eternal verities. . . . The real appeal of Dispatches from the Sporting Life lies in the previously uncollected pieces. Connoisseurs of Richler’s prose will be pleased to discover hard-to-find items from Signature, Inside Sports, GQ, and The New York Times Sports Magazine together in one tidy place. . . . Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a nice start at getting Canada’s greatest writer’s non-fictional house in order.” —The Globe and Mail

“Laced with Richler’s senses of irony and wit on subjects from the sporting world.” —The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)

“It’s a Richler classic. . . . A wonderful selection . . . as achievements go, it’s right up there with pitching a no-hitter in the World Series.” —Joel Yanofsky, The Gazette (Montreal)

“With economy, wit and flair, Richler shows how it’s done. The man’s style is always evident, whether he’s failing to catch salmon in Scotland or rooting on the hapless Habs. . . . Stylish sports essays from a master. . . . Like its namesake, the typeface is immensely readable.” —The Calgary Herald

“Mordecai Richler’s 30 years of sports writing brims with insight and nuance. . . . Richler’s unpretentiousness and willingness to take the air out of anyone and anything—himself included—make him an especially Canadian treasure.” —Quill & Quire

“This collection conveys the passion of a lifelong observer and fan holding up the ideals of sport even as he saw those principles being tarnished by people who should have known better. . . . A fun read . . . tempered here by Richler’s characteristic wit, inimitable voice and cogent argument. . . . [Dispatches from the Sporting Life] should be required reading for some of today’s sports poobahs, the ones holding court in the box seats high above the action.” —Toronto Star

Dispatches from the Sporting Life is a worthy read and a fine examination of one man’s enduring passion.” —Peterborough Examiner

“It is a treat . . . to have a set of such vintage Richler in one attractive volume. The book is razor-sharp, highly amusing, informative, and, at times, laugh-aloud funny. It is not surprising that Richler is so missed." —London Free Press

Author

© Jillian Edelstein
Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal in 1931.  Among his most successful novels are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version.  He died in 2001. View titles by Mordecai Richler

Rights

Available for sale exclusive:
•     Canada

Available for sale non-exclusive:
•     Afghanistan
•     Aland Islands
•     Albania
•     Algeria
•     Andorra
•     Angola
•     Anguilla
•     Antarctica
•     Argentina
•     Armenia
•     Aruba
•     Austria
•     Azerbaijan
•     Bahrain
•     Belarus
•     Belgium
•     Benin
•     Bhutan
•     Bolivia
•     Bonaire, Saba
•     Bosnia Herzeg.
•     Bouvet Island
•     Brazil
•     Bulgaria
•     Burkina Faso
•     Burundi
•     Cambodia
•     Cameroon
•     Cape Verde
•     Centr.Afr.Rep.
•     Chad
•     Chile
•     China
•     Colombia
•     Comoro Is.
•     Congo
•     Cook Islands
•     Costa Rica
•     Croatia
•     Cuba
•     Curacao
•     Czech Republic
•     Dem. Rep. Congo
•     Denmark
•     Djibouti
•     Dominican Rep.
•     Ecuador
•     Egypt
•     El Salvador
•     Equatorial Gui.
•     Eritrea
•     Estonia
•     Ethiopia
•     Faroe Islands
•     Finland
•     France
•     Fren.Polynesia
•     French Guinea
•     Gabon
•     Georgia
•     Germany
•     Greece
•     Greenland
•     Guadeloupe
•     Guatemala
•     Guinea Republic
•     Guinea-Bissau
•     Haiti
•     Heard/McDon.Isl
•     Honduras
•     Hong Kong
•     Hungary
•     Iceland
•     Indonesia
•     Iran
•     Iraq
•     Israel
•     Italy
•     Ivory Coast
•     Japan
•     Jordan
•     Kazakhstan
•     Kuwait
•     Kyrgyzstan
•     Laos
•     Latvia
•     Lebanon
•     Liberia
•     Libya
•     Liechtenstein
•     Lithuania
•     Luxembourg
•     Macau
•     Macedonia
•     Madagascar
•     Maldives
•     Mali
•     Marshall island
•     Martinique
•     Mauritania
•     Mayotte
•     Mexico
•     Micronesia
•     Moldavia
•     Monaco
•     Mongolia
•     Montenegro
•     Morocco
•     Myanmar
•     Nepal
•     Netherlands
•     New Caledonia
•     Nicaragua
•     Niger
•     Niue
•     Norfolk Island
•     North Korea
•     Norway
•     Oman
•     Palau
•     Palestinian Ter
•     Panama
•     Paraguay
•     Peru
•     Philippines
•     Poland
•     Portugal
•     Qatar
•     Reunion Island
•     Romania
•     Russian Fed.
•     Rwanda
•     Saint Martin
•     San Marino
•     SaoTome Princip
•     Saudi Arabia
•     Senegal
•     Serbia
•     Singapore
•     Sint Maarten
•     Slovakia
•     Slovenia
•     South Korea
•     South Sudan
•     Spain
•     St Barthelemy
•     St.Pier,Miquel.
•     Sth Terr. Franc
•     Sudan
•     Suriname
•     Svalbard
•     Sweden
•     Switzerland
•     Syria
•     Tadschikistan
•     Taiwan
•     Thailand
•     Timor-Leste
•     Togo
•     Tokelau Islands
•     Tunisia
•     Turkey
•     Turkmenistan
•     Ukraine
•     Unit.Arab Emir.
•     Uruguay
•     Uzbekistan
•     Vatican City
•     Venezuela
•     Vietnam
•     Wallis,Futuna
•     West Saharan
•     Western Samoa
•     Yemen

Not available for sale:
•     Antigua/Barbuda
•     Australia
•     Bahamas
•     Bangladesh
•     Barbados
•     Belize
•     Bermuda
•     Botswana
•     Brit.Ind.Oc.Ter
•     Brit.Virgin Is.
•     Brunei
•     Cayman Islands
•     Christmas Islnd
•     Cocos Islands
•     Cyprus
•     Dominica
•     Falkland Islnds
•     Fiji
•     Gambia
•     Ghana
•     Gibraltar
•     Grenada
•     Guam
•     Guernsey
•     Guyana
•     India
•     Ireland
•     Isle of Man
•     Jamaica
•     Jersey
•     Kenya
•     Kiribati
•     Lesotho
•     Malawi
•     Malaysia
•     Malta
•     Mauritius
•     Minor Outl.Ins.
•     Montserrat
•     Mozambique
•     Namibia
•     Nauru
•     New Zealand
•     Nigeria
•     North Mariana
•     Pakistan
•     PapuaNewGuinea
•     Pitcairn Islnds
•     Puerto Rico
•     S. Sandwich Ins
•     Samoa,American
•     Seychelles
•     Sierra Leone
•     Solomon Islands
•     Somalia
•     South Africa
•     Sri Lanka
•     St. Helena
•     St. Lucia
•     St. Vincent
•     St.Chr.,Nevis
•     Swaziland
•     Tanzania
•     Tonga
•     Trinidad,Tobago
•     Turks&Caicos Is
•     Tuvalu
•     US Virgin Is.
•     USA
•     Uganda
•     United Kingdom
•     Vanuatu
•     Zambia
•     Zimbabwe