Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir
Steve Rushin, 2017
Little, Brown and Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316392235
Summary
A wild and bittersweet memoir of a classic '70s childhood
It's a story of the 1970s. Of a road trip in a wood-paneled station wagon, with the kids in the way-back, singing along to the Steve Miller Band.
Brothers waking up early on Saturday mornings for five consecutive hours of cartoons and advertising jingles that they'll be humming all day. A father—one of 3M's greatest and last eight-track-salesman—traveling across the country on the brand-new Boeing 747, providing for his family but wanting nothing more than to get home.
It's Steve Rushin's story: of growing up within a '70s landscape populated with Bic pens, Mr. Clean and Scrubbing Bubbles, lightsabers and those oh-so-coveted Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes.
Sting-Ray Afternoons paints an utterly fond, psychedelically vibrant, laugh-out-loud-funny portrait of an exuberant decade. With sidesplitting commentary, Rushin creates a vivid picture of a decade of wild youth, cultural rebirth, and the meaning of parental, brotherly, sisterly, whole lotta love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 22, 1966
• Raised—Bloomington, Minnesota, USA
• Education—Marquette University
• Awards—National Sportswriter of the Year
• Currently—lives in western Connecticut
Steve Rushin is an American journalist, sportswriter, memoirist, and novelist. He was named the 2005 National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, and is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award.
Early life
Rushin grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota, the third in a family of five kids. He was steeped in sports and sports lore from an early age, watching baseball and football games at the town's Metropolitan Stadium while selling hot dogs and soda to Twins and Vikings fans. Even more, he comes from a long line of talented sports players, including three big-league baseball players from his mother's side.
♦ His great-great uncle, Jack Boyle, had a long career with the Phillies.
♦ His grandfather, Jimmy Boyle, played catcher for the New York Giants.
♦ His great-uncle, Buzz Boyle, was an outfielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
♦ His father, Don, was a blocking back for Johnny Majors at the University of Tennessee.
♦ His older brother, Jim, was a forward on the Providence hockey team that reached the Frozen Four in 1983.
Words and literacy were emphasized in his household: his mother was a teacher and was certain that her son's love of reading (books along with cereal boxes) and writing meant he would become a lawyer, while his businessman father had him look up words in the big red family dictionary and report back on their definitions.
Journalism
Rushin graduated from Marquette University and two weeks later went to work for Sports Illustrated. Within three years, at age 25, he was made a Senior Staff Writer, the youngest ever at SI. In 1994, Rushin wrote a major feature for the magazine's 40th anniversary issue, "How We Got There." Based on different facets of sports and sports history, the article reached 24 pages, longer than any other article published in a single SI issue. From 1998 Rushin penned the "Air & Space" column, eventually departing the magazine in early 2007. Three years later he returned as a contributing writer, and in 2011 wrote his column "Rushin Lit."
Rushin also contributed to Golf Digest and Time magazine. He has written numerous essays for The New York Times with memoirist and former Sports Illustrated colleague Franz Lidz.
Books
Rushin is the author of Pool Cool (1990, a billiards guide), Road Swing: One Fan's Journey Into the Soul of America's Sports (1998, a travelogue ), The Caddie Was a Reindeer (2004, a collection), The Pint Man (2010, a novel), The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects (2013, baseball history ), and Sting-Ray Afternoons (2017, a memoir).
Personal
Rushin and his wife, Rebecca Lobo, live with their four children in Western Connecticut. Lobo is a college basketball analyst and former basketball player. The couple met in a Manhattan bar one night after Rushin had written in Sports Illustrated about sleeping with 10,000 women one night—referring to a WNBA game he had been watching when he fell asleep. Rushin recalled their meeting:
She asked if I was the scribe who once mocked…women's professional basketball. Reluctantly, I said that I was. She asked how many games I'd actually attended. I hung my head and said, "None." And so Rebecca Lobo invited me to watch her team, the New York Liberty, play at Madison Square Garden.… It was—for me, anyway—love at first slight.
In May, 2007, he was the Commencement Day speaker at Marquette, where he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters for "his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing." He said to the graduating class:
Sometimes it pays to think inside a box. And so my daughter and I lay in that box and gazed out at the dozens upon dozens of tulips my wife planted in rows last fall. They bloomed this month, tilting ever so slightly the sun. And I thought how remarkable it is that in nature, life wants to grow towards the light.
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/31/2017.)
Book Reviews
In his funny, elegiac memoir Sting-Ray Afternoons, Rushin mines…ineffably familiar terrain with a sense of irony and deep affection, working hard to capture the look and feel of the 1970s.… Much of what Rushin writes about—the Sears Christmas Wish Book, leaded gasoline, Johnny Carson's many vacations—will strike a chord with anyone who, like me, grew up in that era. What makes the book more than just late-baby-boomer nostalgia is the writing, which is knowing and funny.
Jim Zarroli - NPR
Magnificent... You will not read a better book this summer - and maybe well into the fall and winter, too.
New York Post
Sting-Ray Afternoons is [Rushin's] story of growing up in Bloomington in the 1970s. It's a lighthearted, sentimental look back at a Minnesota childhood with a twist of wryness.… Rushin's told-with-a-smile stories of childhood are worth the trip: bundling into a snowmobile suit in winter, piling into the Ford LTD Country Squire for a cross-country summer vacation, making mild mischief with neighborhood friends, and one memorable disaster when nature called and wouldn't be kept waiting. All seen through that gauzy, yellowish filter that blurs memory with Dad's Super 8 movies.
Casey Common - Minneapoolis Star Tribune
Whether quoting his father as he describes his five kids (“I have one redhead and four shitheads”) or retelling stories about him being drunk on what was the then new Boeing 747, it’s through his father that Rushin captures the mystery and magic of childhood.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Rushin approaches his passion with a mischievous gleam in his eye, a point of view captured perfectly in this anecdote-filled account of the sport's odd corners.... In an era of sports literature when societal significance and statistical algorithms aren't always as fun as we'd hoped, Rushin has reintroduced readers to silliness. Read it with a smile.
Booklist
Although frequent sidetracks into generic comments on life in middle America … sometimes detract from the author's personal story, the nostalgic sweetness of his memories carries the book along comfortably. Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the '70s wasn't as chaotic as it's often made out to be.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Sting-Ray Afternoons ... then take off on your own:
1. Begin your discussion by talking about the Rushin family—Steve's parents and siblings. What kind of family life did his mother and father provide? Does it seem familiar to you? Do you find it different from the way parents approach raising a family today?
2. If you're about Steve Rushin's age, growing up in the same era—the 1970s—was your upbringing similar? Do you recognize or have affection for some of the same cultural icons, or even just simple everyday objects, that he seems to have? What else would you add?
3. Rushin also talks about childhood terrors, in things as simple as a Christmas special or a pop song. Did you have similar fears?
4. The author writes glowingly about the Midwest, which he says was comprised of "unfailingly decent and generous people," who were modest, lived with a sense of humility, and found it unseemly to toot their own horns. Is Rushin's a case of looking through rose-colored glasses or an clear-eyed assessment? Are those virtues similar to those where you grew up?
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5. Follow-up to Question 4: Rushin says the kindnesses "don't seem to recede at all with the passage of time but follow me, the way the moon always followed our car at night." What do you think? Have those traits he describes stayed the same in your life, where you live now or once lived?
6. What statements, or observations do you find particularly funny? How about Rushin's description of Sister Mariella in her "full-penguin habit" with the look of "a woman perpetually caught between elevator doors"? Are there other sections that strike you because of their nostalgia or their particular insights?
7. What about Rushin's inclusion of short histories of consumer products like the Weber Grill or his beloved Sting-Ray bike? Are they interesting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)