Among the many reasons I love Billings, Mont., author Craig Lancaster‘s most recent novel The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter (Lake Union Publishing, released in September) lies in its depiction of sports journalism. The novel is narrated by Mark Westerly, a sportwriter who’s covered boxer Hugo Hunter for most of Hunter’s meteoric career. Now, at the painful end of that career, Westerly has some hard choices to make.

I’ve always been in awe of sportswriters. Their hours are brutal – all nights, all weekends, all the time – and their deadlines worse. They often cover athletes with outsize egos and organizations that have become increasingly skillful at manipulating the press. And, probably more so than any other group of journalists, they run the risk of getting too emotionally close to their sources. In Hugo Hunter, Lancaster gets at all of that with the same deftness and sensitivity he brings to his other novels.

Here, Lancaster expands upon his own experience with the allure of sportswriting. 

I remember clearly the moment I realized that my new stepfather wasn’t like the other dads. My mom and I had settled into Charles Clines’ apartment in Euless, Texas, after he moved us from Casper, Wyoming, where I spent my first three years. Charles’ son Keith, four years my elder, hauled out the morning’s newspaper, pointed at a byline (not that I knew what a byline was then) and said, “That’s my dad.”

There were other hints about Charles’ strange professional life. He’d come home in the wee hours after a nighttime sporting event. He traveled a lot, by car and by plane. He was always bringing home T-shirts, gift bags and other artifacts from his wanderings.

It took me a few years to figure out the scope of things. When I realized that my stepfather got paid to watch games and talk to sports stars, I didn’t have to do much thinking to know that I wanted to grow up and do just what he did. [Read more…]