Benchwarmer: A Sports-Obsessed Memoir of Fatherhood

by Josh Wilker

Overview

A moving, funny, inventive parenting memoir, written in a surprising form: an encyclopedia of failure in sports

What can a new father learn about parenthood from reading sports almanacs? For most dads, the answer to this question is: nothing. But to Josh Wilker, whose life and writing have been defined by sports fandom, all of the joy, helplessness, and absurdity of parenthood are present between the lines.

After all, what better way to think about losing control than Eugenio Velez's forty-five consecutive at-bats without a hit? How better to understand ridiculous joy than the NFL career of Walter Achiu, whose nickname was "Sneeze"? In the stories of sports figures large and small, Wilker finds the pathos in success and the humor in losing.

As the terrified father of a one-day-old, Wilker recalls the 1986 World Series, when the moment was too big for the Red Sox. When he finds himself stealing away for an hour of alone time, Wilker thinks of boxer Roberto Duran, so beaten by Sugar Ray Leonard that he finally gave up. And yet, even as the frustrations and anxieties build, Wilker remembers Mets pitcher Anthony Young, who broke the baseball record for most consecutive losses--and never stopped showing up.

Finding the richness of life in obscure wrestling maneuvers and pop-ups lost in the sun, Benchwarmer is a book of unique humanity and surprising wisdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610394017
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Josh Wilker is a contributor to FoxSports.com, Vice Sports, The Classical, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN.com, and more. His previous memoir, Cardboard Gods, was a featured book in the 2010 "Year in Sports Media" issue of Sports Illustrated, a 2010 Casey Award finalist, and a 2011 Booklist best book of the year. He also blogs on his own site, cardboardgods.net.

Editorial Reviews

03/23/2015
"I've never been able to cry about life but only over aging sports heroes getting their numbers retired," muses Wilker, a sports writer, after he learns that his wife is pregnant, her "belly growing into a wrecking ball." He feels adrift as the birth of the child approaches, and his sense of detachment from the sure bets in his life—the rise and fall of careers, batting averages, and victory formations—likewise offers the reader very little mooring in a sea of self-absorption. Rather than proceeding chronologically, he cannily relates the events of his first year of fatherhood in the style of an A-Z sports almanac—with entries for figures ranging from Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher David Aardsma to New York Giants quarterback Joe Pisarcik, and for terms like benchwarmer, quitter, and zero—in an effort to examine whether his failures at sports have any bearing on his skills as a father. Wilker's account is poignant at times: after asking, "So what is a father?" he notes, "All inherited definitions are reeling, rigid hoaxers flailing at untouchable baseline truths." Elsewhere, the author comes across as achingly naïve: "Becoming a father had forced me into a position, an uncomfortable one for a benchwarmer, of making conscious choices." (May)

Publishers Weekly

“Josh Wilker wants you to believe he has no realm of expertise at all. As a man, a husband, a breadwinner, a first-time father, a onetime college athlete, he's not only never sure of himself; he's often so unsure that he beats himself up over it, literally. But Wilker… once again proves himself the possessor of a particular kind of mastery in his new memoir, Benchwarmer. By fixating on failures — both his own, personally and as a parent, and those of his beloved sports heroes — he's crafted a game plan that turns out to be unbeatable. If the unexamined life is truly not worth living, Wilker takes its flip side to the extreme. A lifetime of addiction to the minutiae of sports, the box scores, career averages, and endless anecdotal legends, has made him a top-shelf Socratic thinker”—Publishers Weekly

"The delights of this fatherhood confessional are various. Perhaps most striking and unusual is Wilker's choice of framing his narrative in the form of an almanac. The almanac becomes a moving metaphor for a universal need to organize the chaotic borders of life experience...This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous—an indispensable read for fathers (and sons) whose joy in life comes not from winning the big game but being alive to witness the beauty of its happening."—Kirkus Reviews

“[Wilker expounds] randomly on his lifelong fandom and new fatherhood…amidst a pantheon of athletic failures, goof-ups, goats, mediocrities, and losers. Most fans will find something in that litany to enjoy.”—Booklist

“Benchwarmer is the funniest, saddest, most touching picture of manhood in the 21st century that I have ever read.”—Jonathan Eig, author of Luckiest Man

“Saying Josh Wilker writes about sports is like saying Proust wrote about cookies, or Tolstoy about Russia. The courts and ball fields are merely arenas in which he illuminates the entire human experience. Wilker is able to recognize within the ordinary—missed free throws, child rearing, the unheroic challenges of daily life— the authentically sublime. Benchwarmeris the best kind of art there is, the kind that makes you delighted to be alive.”—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

“Josh Wilker and I traded baseball cards and played Little League together. Yet each time I read his moving prose, I learn more about life's journey—his, and that of our generation.” —Buster Olney, senior writer, ESPN

“Benchwarmer is a book for anyone who's ever loved sports, or had a kid. It's a book about boys and about men, and you will weep.” —Rob Neyer, Fox Sports

“Sports as an organizing principle for stumbling through life and fatherhood—funny, enchanting and lyrical. Painfully familiar.”—Sports Illustrated

“Josh Wilker wants you to believe he has no realm of expertise at all. As a man, a husband, a breadwinner, a first-time father, a onetime college athlete, he's not only never sure of himself; he's often so unsure that he beats himself up over it, literally. But Wilker… once again proves himself the possessor of a particular kind of mastery in his new memoir, Benchwarmer. By fixating on failures — both his own, personally and as a parent, and those of his beloved sports heroes — he's crafted a game plan that turns out to be unbeatable.”—The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

2015-02-05
A sports-obsessed memoir of fatherhood.The delights of this fatherhood confessional are various. Perhaps most striking and unusual is Wilker's (Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, 2010) choice of framing his narrative in the form of an almanac. The almanac becomes a moving metaphor for a universal need to organize the chaotic borders of life experience. The author divides the book into four volumes spanning the first year of his son Jack's life. The almanac is then subdivided alphabetically, starting with Aardsma, David, ending with Zidane, Zinedine, and running a curious gamut of terms, personae, ideas and anecdotes. The first entry in Volume 4, section W, for example, is Webber, Chris—the now retired all-star NBA player. The entry beneath his name reads, "Time can't be stopped," referencing his disastrous timeout in the 1993 national championship game, while making light of the fact that there are no convenient timeouts in real life, either. For sports fans (who also happen to be experiencing fatherhood), Wilker's almanac is rife with poignant, essayistic forays into these dusty corners of sports history. Perhaps the memoir's most important takeaway is the acknowledgment that even the best of parents are sometimes faking it, doing what they can to make the world less dangerous for the young and still innocent. "When Jack was first born I didn't know how to hold him," writes the author, "but within a week or so the awkwardness of holding him gave way to the feeling that holding him was the thing I'd been born to do, the feeling that made me whole." This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous—an indispensable read for fathers (and sons) whose joy in life comes not from winning the big game but being alive to witness the beauty of its happening.

Kirkus Reviews