Hardball

Hardball for Billy Budd Novel by Richard Dann

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Hardball for Bill Budd belongs to an elite genre of homoerotic literature which is written with enough skill to resonate on an epic level. Yet to some degree, all erotic books aspire to ascend to that [plane] because heroism and idealism and tribalism are so innately linked to male sexuality. Richard Dann offers a look into the heart of darkness in our culture, our entertainment, and ourselves. In all cultures it is the classical heroes who endure horrifying initiations, are killed and reborn, and return as new people with revolutionary visions. It is in that rich mythological framework that we meet Billy Budd. He has all the arrogance of a gifted young man: a Greek God, the golden child, the protege athlete, the darling of Great Western, destined for great honors.
The nature of Billy's initiation is graphically sexual, and at times so intense that it borders on the shocking. Sweat, semen, blood, and implements of torture all play a part. But at the core of this dark story, however, is something quite tender. There is love here--not always identifiable as such, but love nevertheless, for sport, society, and the dark side of manhood, a recognition of the sharper side of tenderness.
Work on this level is no accident.
-- Bron Thorson, XFactor, Phoenix, AZ

Re: Hardball for Billy Budd by Richard Dann

Coinciding with Super Bowl Sunday this month comes Richard Dann's highly imaginative fantasy of Saturday's Hero, the college football quarterback. Bad-Billy "Rawdy" Budd is Great Western's golden boy, sculpted as Adonis and destined for glory and gridiron greatness, the Rose Bowl and the Heisman--if he can reverse last Saturday's humiliating loss and win the last game of the season.
But to survive as GW's starter, he now must endure the Ceremony.
And it's with the ritualistic and futuristic Ceremony that author Dann manacles us to his compelling narrative to explore new yard markers in fantasy. The torment and pain endured in the name of love, courage, friendship and maturity are played out with team members, university administrators and a brother already venerated as a sports legend.
Locker room raw is the language and, given the direction of college athletic programs today, academia's approvalof the Ceremony is not all that far removed from reality. Blended with blood, sweat and studded leather straps for purification, Budd reveals an underlying sentimentality for the Classics man. Dungeonesque descriptions aside, author Dann is a Romantic and his Billy Budd is scintillating, super reading.
-- Patrick Muller, Stonewall News Northwest (Spokane)

Hardball for Billy Budd was not misnamed.
Essentially, it is a love story lovingly told; yet it is a tough love story, because the writer plays hardball with his hero, who has some hard lessons to learn. At the same time, he plays hardball with his reader, who has his own hard lessons to learn.
But "Hardball" is more than a love story. Richard Dann brings into the story considerations of sex and its relationship to love, problems of belonging to a major cultural lifestyle, and then investigates the lifestyle of an underground subculture, with all the fascination and terrors to be found there. As the hero searches into himself, testing his courage, testing his major beliefs, the reader becomes a participant who is likewise tested and cannot help but examine his own beliefs, his own courage in facing up to those beliefs. These are, indeed, hard lessons. And they become harder.
Starting in the midst of things, the story focuses on the role of pain in the love-courage-friendship-responsibility matrix. I found this aspect of the story difficult to confront. But from the first chapter, from the first paragraph, you know that you are in the hands of a writer who knows his craft, who won't let you down. I trust an author who respects his readers as much as he believes in his hero, and came out, at the end, a more thoughtful person. Out of pain beauty is born.
The moment of quiet transcendence that closes the book stayed with me long after I put it down. Hardball for Billy Budd is a fully satisfying reading experience, rare these days. Not to be missed.
---Bill McReady

-------------- and on the other hand --

At first I wasn't sure what's the big deal with Billy Budd getting his perfect gridiron bod tackled and penetrated and whipped and generally skewered by his teammates and some of the college functionaries, but that's the story in the novel, Hardball for Billy Budd by Richard Dann. Maybe it is a big deal after all, since his brother takes part in the action (oh, does that get your interest up?).
At first take the book seems to be a somewhat elaborate spoof of sports as we know it in the US at the beginning of the 21st century, and it is that, although there is so much truth coming through about maturing and masculinity and general male magnificence in the aura of anachronistic academia (if you don't like polysyllabics and alliteration, you won't like the book) that you are forced to do a double-take about every other page. Relating to one's contemporaries through sexuality, and in this case in practically virgin territory, is one way to grow up—at least it is if the experience teaches you anything. And in this case the real edification takes place with all the panoply that the academic sports-dramatists can envision for the education of the team and the enjoyment of themselves and the horny alumni. Of course we get glimpses of some other junior varsity plays going on in the background, but Billy and his friends are enough to keep us occupied.
Luckily, Billy saw the light slightly before the final confrontation, and so we get the impression that he was always looking up (even when figuratively face down) as the challenges played out. This novel may be the most thorough and rousing coming-of-age story yet told.
— Bill Lee, Author of Different Slopes

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This book was nominated for this award.

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