A Sports Odyssey

Grant Farred has long had a passionate connection with sports. In A Sports Odyssey, he weaves together an account of his own sports fandom that is profoundly personal and universal. As readers of his Long Distance Love know, Grant Farred has been a supporter of the English Premier League club, Liverpool Football Club, for decades. His fandom for that team launched an unexpected connection with a world beyond the limits of the apartheid state of his upbringing in South Africa. However, A Sports Odyssey shows that as Farreds fervor for Liverpool ended, he developed a new set of sports attachments in Ithaca, New York: to his sons youth basketball career, to the mens basketball team at Cornell University and its coach, and even to professional teams like the New York Knicks. Farreds bemusement at finding himself a sports parent, a New Yorker, and a company man, only underline the sincerity of his affections. In A Sports Odyssey, Farred writes elegantly and eloquently about how sports and sports fandom create a sense of belonging, but also loss. This is a heartfelt examination of how we find home in who and what we love. In the series Sporting