S.J. Rozan: Violence in Sports and the American Way
Born and brought up in the Bronx, S.J. Rozan works as an architect at a New York City firm that has designed police stations, firehouses, zoo buildings, and the largest terra cotta restoration project in the world. Rozan has also worked as a self-defense instructor, jewelry saleswoman, and janitor.
Rozan's mystery series alternately features detective Lydia Chin and her sometime partner, Bill Smith. Since the first title, China Trade, Chin and Smith have investigated crimes that have dropped them right into the various gaps that separate their cultures -- and, often, into trouble. Rozan's latest novel, Winter and Night, is a Book Sense Top Ten Mystery Pick, and Reflecting the Sky has just been nominated for the Edgar Award.
BookSense.com: Your new book, Winter and Night, is about high school football and high school violence. Are they really as intertwined as you say?
S.J. Rozan: They can be. High school is a difficult time, harder now than when I was a kid -- and it was hard enough then. The pressures on teenagers are enormous at a time when they suddenly realize they don't know who they are: when they start to create identities for themselves separate from their parents'. They've reached the age in evolutionary terms -- not to put too fine a point on it -- when the younger members of the tribe begin to challenge the older members for supremacy. In terms of Darwinian survival this is a useful situation for the tribe. It brings in new blood and keeps the old leaders on their toes. In terms of the modern suburb, it can be tough.
And this has to do with sports how?
The object of games of any sort is the ritualization of aggression. Aggression is vital to the survival of the species on a primitive, hunting-and-gathering, homestead-defending level - and our mental processes haven't evolved beyond that, cultural gloss notwithstanding. But aggression becomes a lot less useful when it causes members of a tribe to turn on each other, as it will if uncontrolled. (Anyone who's ever seen a Saturday night bar fight between close friends has seen that.) So we've developed channels for it, substitutions for battles where we can declare a winner without having to bury the losers.
And football?
Football, more than other sports -- even boxing -- is organized around stopping the enemy by physical force. In boxing, two fighters can go through a whole contest and both be standing at the end. In football, each play is 11 private fights, each of which only ends with someone on the ground and someone else on top of him holding him there. Football is about hitting, sacking, clobbering, smashing.
Sounds like fun.
It is fun. It's not dangerous in itself -- except for the people who choose to play it, and that's their choice. The problem comes when you teach boys to do this, and then also teach them that nothing else good that they do is as valuable, nor is anything else bad they do serious, as long as they win their ritualized battles for the tribe. To translate: don't bother with schoolwork, push smaller kids around, it's all okay as long as you play football for the glory of the town on Friday night.
So the kids aren't the problem, the parents are?
Parents, teachers, booster clubs. Not always, not in every football community, of course not. But in the places where the adults have lost their sense of proportion, what they can create is kids who've only learned what they've been taught: strength and aggression are rewarded, their particular sub-tribe is more special than others, and there is no punishment for minor or major wrongdoing, for them.
Which leads to violence?
Sometimes from them, sometimes as a reaction to them. It's not necessarily a straight line, but you can see the starting point if you look closely -- more closely at the adults than at the kids.
Are you saying this is where high school violence comes from -- football players and other kids' reactions to them?
Again, not always, of course. But it played a big part, for example, at Columbine, and I was struck by the complete lack of understanding of that shown by the parents, the teachers, and the people of Littleton.
So you wrote a book about it.
In my sub-tribe, that's what we do.
S.J. Rozan Recommends:
My A-number one top favorite crime writer is John LeCarre -- The Constant Gardener, what a knockout. Martin Cruz Smith, especially Rose and Havana Bay. P.D. James, any book. George Pelecanos, especially King Suckerman. Keith Snyder's The Night Men. A very under-appreciated writer named Barbara Hambly who has a series (A Free Man of Color, Fever Season, and Die Upon a Kiss) set in New Orleans and narrated by a former slave.