A Sports Odyssey

My Ithaca Journal

Grant Farred

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781439926956, 9781439926949
• eBook ISBN: 9781439926963
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

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 Farred's fervor for Liverpool ended, he developed a new set of sports attachments in Ithaca, New York: to his son's youth basketball career, to the men's basketball team at Cornell University and its coach, and even to professional teams like the New York Knicks. Farred's 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

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments.
• Introduction: My Ithaca Journal.
• The Decision, One That Lacks a Clear Explanation.
• Nature Abhors a Vacuum.
• The Ivies: Three Tours of Duty.
• January 26, 2024: A Day to Remember.
• 7:30 p.m., January 26, 2024: Ezra’s Starting.
• January 27, 2024: Charles Oakley.
• Intra-Ivy Envy. Or, Which of These Five Schools Is More Insecure about Its Ivy Status than Its Peers? Or, Only in America.
• Class Warfare in the “Little Ivies.”
• Dartmouth, Again, Briefly. But Not for the Last Time.
• Intra-Ivy Fraternal Tensions, Continued.
• February 2, 2024.
• January 27, 2024.
• A Colored Ivy. Penn, Again.
• January 27, 2024: Beating Princeton.
• January 31, 2024.
• January 27, 2024.
• “Over-Rated.”
• 11:25 a.m., January 30, 2024.
• January 27, 2024.
• 4:45 p.m., January 27, 2024.
• A Saturday in September 1990.
• Brian Earl Is a Princeton Man. I Am Not a Princeton Man. Maybe Brian Earl Is Not a Princeton Man.
• 4:45 p.m., January 27, 2024.
• 1:36 p.m., January 26, 2024.
• Lead Story on the Six O’clock News in England: January 26, 2024.
• #20s.
• January 27, 2024.
• The Game after The Announcement.
• January 28, 2024.
• January 30, 2024.
• Pep Guardiola on Sleeping Easy.
• Pep Knows.
• Jürgen Klopp Knows What Pep Knows. Twice Over.
• January 31, 2024.
• February 1, 2024.
• 1:10 p.m., February 6, 2024.
• January 31, 2024.
• Jürgen Klopp’s Birthday.
• 1:00 p.m., February 8, 2024.
• Ulla Sandrock.
• February 9, 2024.
• February 10, 2024.
• February 11, 2024.
• Why the Niners Made It Difficult to Root for Them.
• Taylor Swift Puts the Fear of Electoral Defeat into MAGA.
• The Morning After the Morning After the Morning After, the Niners Make You Happy They Lost.
• CK, KC: As a Curse.
• February 16, 2024.
• “Ferret.”
• February 17, 2024.
• 8:00 p.m., February 17, 2024.
• 5:34 p.m., February 18, 2024.
• Phil Collins.
• 8:17 p.m., February 19, 2024.
• 1:02 p.m., February 20, 2024.
• 9:15 a.m., February 27, 2024.
• Brian Earl: Princetonian Gone Rogue?
• 7:23 p.m., February 21, 2024.
• Winning the Ivies.
• February 20, 2024.
• Chris Manon.
• Wistfulness, Regret.
• 12:45 p.m., June 1, 2019: Madrid, Spain.
• TAA.
• February 23, 2024.
• 10:28 a.m., February 23, 2024.
• 7:05 p.m., February 23, 2024.
• National Anthem.
• 7:15 p.m., February 23, 2024.
• February 25, 2024.
• 11:27 a.m., February 26, 2024.
• 1:40 p.m., March 16, 2024.
• 2:00 p.m., March 16, 2024.
• It’s Elton John Time.
• Brian Earl’s Face.
• 8:16 p.m., March 16, 2024.
• 10:56 a.m., St. Patrick’s Day.
• March 18, 2024.
• Ivy Title Game.
• March 20, 2024.
• March 19, 2024.
• You Lose Something When They’re Gone.
• The New York Knicks.
• Bob Dylan.
• Postscript: 9:37 a.m., March 24, 2024.
• The Postscript’s Postscript: Subtext.
• Notes.
• Index.