Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #3: "The Karmic Quarterback"

I am not a sports fan. That's not to say that I never enjoy watching baseball, soccer, basketball, or some other sport, but I don't care who wins. To me, as long as the game is played well, it's worth watching. I attended Purdue University but if Purdue is playing and loses, it doesn't upset me. 

So I surprised myself when, early on in my writing career, I wrote a sports story and got it published in a magazine called Aethelon. The title of the story was "The Karmic Quarterback." If sports is not my forte, human endeavor is. Though we make them into heroes and icons, athletes are people and are subjected to the same quirks as we are, though this is not often written about. Two of the few sports I participated in were yoga (the most popular sport in America if you count the number of people who participate in the sport) and running. Though I never did either of these sports competitively, I participated in both regularly for many years. This is where imagination began working to produce a story.

The athletic character in fiction very often falls into a stock figure, and we know what he or she is like. But I've known some athletes who were pushed by their parents to play sports but didn't like it and threw off the yoke of sports as soon as they could. As the story formed in my mind, I decided to write about a young man in a small town who is a star quarterback because his father has relentlessly pushed him to be as much. He is good, he is not really bitter or resentful about what his parents have done, but he is restless and unsettled—and does not quite know why.

The character, Jeff, lives in a small town. What he does resent is everyone making him a hero and the expectation that under his leadership the team may win the state championship. I grew up in Indiana, and in small towns there, sports reigns and local heroes are enshrined if the team does well. If you've ever seen the film Hoosiers you'll know what I'm talking about. One night at a local hang-out, though, Jeff runs into Lena, a fellow student.

Lena isn't just your ordinary student. She practices yoga and eastern spirituality. She is a vegetarian. But she is also one of the top runners in town, having led the women's team to two state titles. People don't know how to think about her. She and Jeff begin to date. She introduces him to yoga and meditation. To the horror of everyone, he begins to change into what a local newspaper calls "the karmic quarterback." But the team begins to win, defeating larger city teams that always take them out of the playoffs.

People move against Lena. They find a book in her locker on Shakti, the female principle of yoga. The book has photographs of women doing yoga nude and she is expelled for three days and suspended from the soccer team. Jeff refuses to play despite all the pressure put on him to do so. He will not go on the field unless Lena is acquitted and put back on the team.

What makes an athlete tick? A lot of things, but unless his or her heart is in what they do, he or she will not excel. "Ya gotta have heart," the baseball coach in Damn Yankees sings. Jeff learns to yoke together (the meaning of yoga) his ambition as an athlete, his physical and spiritual make up, and his love of Lena, into a single stream of energy. When he does, he is unstoppable. But to do this, he must go outside the limits set by traditional sports philosophies and practices.

"The Karmic Quarterback" was an exercise in taking a subject in which I'm not particularly interested and making it my own by bringing my scant experience, my observation on the topic, and some quirky "spin" to the topic. Try this in your own writing. The story, though an early endeavor, and though written about a subject I don't have a lot of expertise in, is one of my better ones—at least I think it is.

Here is a link to the story, though you can only read part of it for free and have to sign up as a member of the magazine group to read the whole thing (or take their free trial, read the story, and then say, No thanks to the subscription).

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