During his final days, Peter Unwin’s father talked a great deal about sports. Through an oxygen mask, one eye blind from a stroke, he told stories about “the buffoonery of men, brave but foolish men who played hard and drank hard.” Unwin welcomes this connection. “Seated next to my father at the hospital, I talked to him about his sporting life and his world of play,” he writes. “He was eager to tell me, even in a hurry. I was eager to know.” Playing Hard captures these stories told by father to adult son, but also reaches far beyond the personal, transforming into a satisfying ode to the universal value of play in all its incarnations.
Each essay is thoughtfully linked, written with a familiar nostalgic tone readers will have come to expect from the wider tradition of sports literature. Unwin’s father offers a poignant through line about the importance of play that encompasses his experience of war, and his struggles with personal and cultural change. The notion of sport as solace then reappears via sporting history, small town anecdotes, and the writer’s own sense of his roles as both a sportsman and father.
While the book largely concerns itself with popular athletic pastimes, it does dive into the obscure to reveal that the value of play is everywhere. (A particularly dramatic game of Snakes and Ladders played against a four-year-old makes this point nicely.) In writing about everything from baseball to card games and snooker to lacrosse, Unwin illuminates play as a training ground for integrity, whether it facilitates a child’s early discovery of right and wrong, or reinforces the understanding of justice throughout a lifetime. In speaking of his beloved game of baseball, for example, Unwin observes that “the logic and the morality of the game did not waver.”
Effortlessly combining personal memoir with a broader historical landscape, Unwin emphasizes both sports and storytelling as vital means of preservation. Seemingly disparate images are brought together to create a coherent and satisfying narrative whole. Down a player, neighbourhood children train a dog to play centre field. During the SARS outbreak, men gather on a basement basketball court a few times a week to process and connect. A soccer legend drinks himself to death. Two sisters do water “gun” battle with a group of local boys. Rival universities raucously celebrate the (drunken) joy of competition. A writer says a final goodbye to his sport-loving father.
At the end, “[w]hen I watched my father’s passing, I saw something similar to the closing down of play,” Unwin writes.
Playing Hard is a moving personal document that asserts “the sportsman’s belief that even the very worst things that happen to us in life can be healed by play.” Unwin celebrates sport as a unifying element, underscoring its inherent value across generations and throughout lifetimes. Ultimately, play has the power to buoy and unite us, and, as the collection attests, can act as a means of keeping us and our histories alive.