Kenny Mayne Has Written A Book
Sneaky guy, that Kenny Mayne. His book, self-effacingly entitled “An Incomplete and Inaccurate History of Sport,” is a series of vignettes nominally about games but largely about childhood, fatherhood and the power of memory.
All of that sounds way too pretentious for ESPN’s Duke of Deadpan to acknowledge, but it’s true. Mayne has pulled off a compelling read without appearing to try.
“I don’t think anybody really wants to read The Kenny Mayne Story,” he said from his Connecticut home recently.
And so he didn’t write it. What he did was explain how sports serve as entertainment in the here and now and then become conduits back to our childhood. The memories are vivid because they involve people and action and sights and sounds.
The scene is often set in Seattle in the early 1970s – before the Seahawks and Mariners and back when the coolest sporting venue was Longacres, a horse racing venue that disappeared when Boeing exercised an option to buy it and put up something corporate in its place. Mayne and his buddies hung out at the eighth pole, dressed in T-shirts rather than suits and certain the Beautiful People at Churchill Downs were missing out on the real experience.
In reading, you can fill in your own friends and teams and moments, and that’s true even if you didn’t grow up with local pro teams dotting every day of the calendar. (Mayne was a Green Bay Packers fan as a kid because the Seahawks didn’t exist until 1976.)
In traveling to promote the book, Mayne found precisely what he thought he’d find. He did a reading in Seattle recently and was pleased when a man walked up to him afterwards. He didn’t remember the guy’s name, but he recognized it when he heard it.
“I knew who he was right away,” Mayne said. “Little League team in 1968.”
To learn more, check out this simply and appropriate named site.