SOURCE: Boe, Alfred F. “Salinger and Sport.”¹ Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 14, no. 1 (fall 1996): 41-5.

In the following essay, Boe asserts that Salinger employs sport as a significant thematic device in many of his stories.

O Chestnut tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? 

—W. B. Yeats

In J. D. Salinger's universe, sport, like human beings and many other phenomena, tends to be divided into two categories, phony and authentic—not, as Warren French ineptly puts it in his Twayne study of Salinger, phony and “nice” (J. D. Salinger, revised edition [Boston: Twayne, 1976], chapter two). Here French falls into the trap of identifying author with narrating character. “Nice” is Holden Caulfield's word, not Salinger's, and though Salinger as far as I can recall never actually...