Authors and Books
for Children

John R. Tunis: Playing Hardball for the Love of the Game

Think sports at every level have become over-commercialized, morally empty, win-at-all-costs contests? Think the line between professional and amateur sports has been blurred into meaninglessness? Think the blind hero worship of sports figures is deplorable? Think these are new questions? Think again. Sportswriter and children's author John R. Tunis dealt with all these themes in his writing--starting almost seventy-five years ago.

John Roberts Tunis was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1889; his father, a Unitarian minister, died when Tunis was only six years old. Thanks to his mother's determination and emphasis on education, he graduated in 1911 from Harvard University, where he played on the tennis team and participated in track and field. An indifferent student, he noted in his autobiography, A Measure of Independence (1964), that his interests in college were athletics and theater, not learning. After graduation, he studied law at Boston University, worked in a cotton mill, and served in the United States Army in France, as a second lieutenant, during World War I. He married Lucy Rogers in 1918.


After the war, Tunis started writing about sports for various magazines, eventually becoming a frequent contributor to such heavyweights as Atlantic Monthly, Collier's, Harper's, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1925 he began covering sports for the New York Evening Post. A talented amateur tennis player himself, he covered Davis Cup tournaments for several years. He broadcast tennis tournaments for NBC radio between 1934 and 1942 and was part of the first radio broadcast of the Wimbledon tournament back to the United States.

Tunis's first book $port$: Heroics and Hysterics (1928), a nonfiction work for adults, with its telling dollar signs in the title, laid out themes that also ran through his later sports novels for young adults: the corrosive influence of money on sports, the myth that the sports culture actually promotes goodwill and good character, the metamorphosis of both professional and so-called amateur athletes from sportsmen into businessmen. His only novel for adults, the controversial American Girl (1930), offered a fictionalized view of tennis player Helen Wills Moody as both exploited and exploiter in the world of organized amateur tennis. A film adaptation, Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) was directed by Ida Lupino.

Tunis also took aim at college sports, particularly football, and the overemphasis on athletics in college, most notably in a series of essays for Harper's. In the mid-1930s he turned to writing fiction for young people, a format that allowed him to continue to expound his views of the best and worst in sports, the moral dilemmas and the on- and off-the-field struggles of athletes, in twenty-one books over the next thirty years. His first two juvenile novels, Iron Duke (1938) and The Duke Decides (1939), feature a Harvard track star who makes the 1936 Olympic team and competes in Hitler's Berlin.

Tunis also examined high school basketball. Yea! Wildcats! (1944) , A City for Lincoln (1945), and Go, Team, Go (1954) explore themes of leadership and corruption in both sports and politics. All-American (1942), deals with anti-Semitism, racism, and the win-at-all-costs mindset in a high school football team.

But Tunis is perhaps best remembered for nine baseball novels for young people, eight of them featuring a fictionalized Brooklyn Dodgers team, and several featuring Roy Tucker, the embodiment of an all-American hero, whom some have likened to Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952). In these baseball books--The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940), World Series (1941), Keystone Kids (1943), Rookie of the Year (1944), The Kid Comes Back (1946), Highpockets (1948), Young Razzle (1949), Buddy and the Old Pro (1955, his only non-Dodgers baseball novel), and Schoolboy Johnson (1958)--Tunis uses the context of sports to explore themes of personal growth and struggle; male bonding; the team versus the individual; the meaning of leadership; and even democracy, discrimination, and anti-Semitism. Though he is concerned with inner conflicts, he uses his vast knowledge of the sports scene to spin exciting, involving stories rooted in realities.

As Bruce Brooks noted in the introduction to the 1987 printing of The Kid From Tomkinsville:

...for Tunis a win was what happened at the ballpark some of the time, usually just before a loss. It didn't make you a good person, anymore than a loss made you a jerk.