Showing results for "Natural" in Sports

The Natural puts you in the boots of famed rodeo announcer Brad Turner, racing his horse Golden Boy into the arena and welcoming the crowd to a pro rodeo performance in Jackson, Mississippi. You'll hit the road with Brad as he crisscrosses the country, struggling with life, love, and business on the pro rodeo circuit. You'll meet Zola Johns, the rebellious, barrel-racing beauty with her eye on the prize of winning a national championship, and Shoat Krammer, the young rough-and-tumble rookie that's the real natural coming up the hard way.

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first - and some would say still the best - novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material - the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era - and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work.