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Summer of Champions
by Dewey Johnson
Texas Tech University Press, 2005. 244 pages.
Dewey Johnson, a Presbyterian minister who was born in Lubbock, Texas and raised in Roswell, New Mexico, has written a sweetheart of a novel about 11-year-old Joe Don Miller, who, in Roswell in 1956 copes with the stresses of school, Little League baseball, ethnic rivalry, the arrest of his homeroom teacher, and first love and kisses. Add to all this that his father was killed in Korea and his mother, Lurleen, is raising him alone in a place that seems to value two-parent families more than it respects and remembers sacrifice, and young Joe Don has a lot going on.
Joe Don narrates the story. The significant male presence in his life, his homeroom teacher, has made a deep impression on Joe Don about what it means to be a champion.
My homeroom teacher, Mr. Connell, was teaching us how to be champions. He was a student of the ancient Greeks, the people who gave us the Olympics and heroes. He said that the Greeks sought excellence in all things, strove to be physically and mentally fit. I was doing the same.
A straight-A report card gives evidence of Joe Don’s mental fitness and his skill as baseball player does the same for the physical. He is a good friend and a good son as well, a help to his mother and conscientious about his Saturday morning job helping out at Whitman’s Auto for twenty-five cents. A typical boy, he expends much energy strategizing as to how to retrieve a stray Playboy Magazine from a dumpster, telling adolescent jokes, and figuring out how to deal with his idolization of Janet Mitchum while trying to fend off the attentions of Sherry Watson. Despite the occasional run-in with gangs from the somewhat segregated Mexican population and with the bullying older boys from the local high school, Joe Don has a lot of good in his life and seems well on his way to being the champion that is his ideal.
A downward spiral begins, though, when Mr. Connell is arrested on charges that Joe Don neither understands nor accepts. His strong state of denial leads to behavior that is unchampionlike. On a parallel track, as it were, offstage, the Roswell All-Star team is winning its way toward the finals at the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Dewey Johnson takes Joe Don through a summer of numerous dramas, comedies, and reconciliations in a way that had me turning the pages non-stop every chance I had to sit down and read for two days. The novel resolves in a way that feels, well, classic, as when the characters in a Shakespeare comedy find all the pieces falling together in the final lines of Act Five.
It has often struck me that novels narrated in the first person by characters who are still children are flawed by a false sense of innocence. What I mean is that the adult author, writing in the guise of a child, seems to try so hard not to display his or her own capacity for hindsight that the voice of the young narrator rings false. Johnson’s Joe Don Miller, perhaps because he is so self-assured that he would not want to be seen as innocent, rings true and genuine — like any 11-year-old, he surely wishes to be known for more substance than his psyche can probably support, so the telling of his story is never marred by the false naiveté that so many youthful narrators demonstrate.
Summer of Champions is moving, finely observed, and very funny. In his coming-of-age, Joe Don is unpretentious, honest, and vigorous. The trajectory of his growth from beginning to end is remarkable and believable, not least because both we and Joe Don know that he still has a long way to go toward manhood.
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