The 80-Yard Run
I rank Irwin Shaw’s 1941 short story “The Eighty-Yard Run” among the best. It’s as good as any of Papa Hemingway’s, but then Irwin’s strengths were always in that genre. I was a friend of his, having written a fan letter after the publication of his novel Evening in Byzantium. We skied a bit and played some tennis. He was a toughie, and he told me how he almost came to blows with the great Papa at the 21 Club in New York. (Hemingway by then was much too old and far too drunk to fight, so Irwin gave him a pass.) Another interesting bit of talk concerned Shaw’s very good novel The Young Lions. Irwin had entered Germany in the closing months of the war with an American outfit as a newsman. During a sweep, his squad came upon a young German pilot hanging from a tree after bailing out. “Cut me down and I’ll accept your surrender,” he told the Americans. Some jerk shot him dead. “I hated it,” said Irwin, “but being Jewish, in my novel I switched the pilot to an American and had the Germans shoot him.” Christian Diestl, the German ski guide returning home disillusioned from the battles, says to himself in the novel, “If all the Americans are like this one, the war sure is lost.”
“The Eighty-Yard Run” is a depressing tale, a sort of Gatsby Lite, as the anti-hero Christian Darling realizes the high point of his dull life was a college football 80-yard run—in practice. His slide from Mount Olympus is depressing because it reveals Olympus was a molehill, and still, downhill it was from then on. Shaw wrote clear strong prose. Today’s writers give us a masterclass of incoherent scribble, with syntax now bending under the weight of confusion. No wonder no one reads any more.
Which brings me to the point I wish to make. I recently read that half of our fellow Americans didn’t crack open a single book in 2025. Ouch! Could this possibly be true? Are there about 175 million Americans who did not buy, open or read a book last year? It sounds like something out of a horror film, or Orwell’s 1984. A pessimist friend said to me it was good news. When I questioned his state of mind and sobriety, he answered that “otherwise they might be reading that Shakespeare was an illiterate moneylender and the plays were written by a black Jewish woman by the name of Emilia Bassano.” (This outrageous rumor is making news in Europe, especially among feminists, antiracists, and certain Jewish intellectuals who believe Brits to be antisemites due to Shakespeare and Dickens.)
All I know is that no black Jewish woman wrote the plays, but a white Englishman, be it the Earl of Southampton, Edward de Vere, or William Shakespeare, or even Christopher Marlowe before his grisly murder. But if one never reads but watches a screen all day and night, how would they know? And it gets much worse. Forget Shakespeare; this is much ado about nothing compared to what’s happening in American schools.
Generation Z students are arriving at college with such feeble reading skills that some are incapable of even comprehending full sentences. Generation Z, I am told, is more focused on TikTok than printed text. At first I was surprised, but then I came into contact with a youngster or two, and my surprise turned to understanding. A generation glued to phones, videos and AI is not expected to know who Anna Karenina is, let alone her lover Count Vronski. Mind you, poor schools do not help, nor does wokeness. Apparently woke ideology far surpasses civic literacy in U.S. colleges. Add feminization, digitalization, cancel culture, and narcissism and you have a hell of a mess. The son of a European friend told his father after one semester at Columbia that America is a country divided between zillions of highly sensitive females who burst into tears when watching cartoons, and grim, hatchet-faced, Nazi-like, men-hating maniacs. An obvious exaggeration, I told my buddy—but perhaps it was a black American Jewish woman who wrote those plays after all. It was safer to say that as there were some women around.
“The Eighty-Yard Run” was on my mind recently—it is always there because of my golden memories at the University of Virginia and the beautiful southern belles I dated, lots of booze and great frat parties—because of some football college news: Duke University is suing its student and quarterback Darian Mensah to prevent him from transferring to Miami to replace Miami’s sixth-year quarterback Carson Beck. Duke has rights. Back in 2024 Mensah signed an $8 million contract with Duke. For any of you unfamiliar with American higher education, Duke is a university and college football is an amateur sport. Mensah had previously played for Tulane for an undisclosed amount.
Eat your hearts out, you fools like Frank Gifford, Doc Blanchard, Kyle Rote, Red Grange, and thousands of others who as college athletes stupidly played only for glory. Come back, Christian Darling, all is forgiven—hooray for your 80-yard run in practice.
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