Sounds like an inspirational story if ever there was one. But Eason's moving Runt of the Litter , about his rise to football fame, is anything but inspirational. He begins, appropriately enough, with Little League. It's here, holding the bat at age nine, that he first feels the power of sports. His father, who's never home during the day, shows up for the game to cheer him on.
Henry learns early that the best way to earn love is on the field.
This story might be mawkish, but Eason elevates it out of banal sports lore with his extraordinary attention to detail. It is this precision of memory that lifts Eason's football story into the realm of literature, one that's both revelatory in a deeply personal way and archetypically American. Because Jack's dad pays attention when he plays football, the boy turns himself into a gridiron player. But what starts as the story of a self-made man ultimately reveals the sometimes dangerous underpinnings of such mythmaking. Jack makes himself get up at five a.m. to exercise.