William Faulkner and Sports Illustrated

The vacant ice looked tired, though it shouldn't have. They told him it had been put down only a few minutes ago following a basketball game, and after the hockey match it would be taken up again to make room for something else. But it looked not expectant but resigned, like the mirror simulating ice in the Christmas store window, not before the miniature fir trees and reindeer and cosy lamplit cottage were arranged upon it, but after they had been dismantled and cleared away.

Then it was filled with motion, speed. To the innocent, who had never seen it before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. Then it would break, coalesce through a kind of kaleidoscopic whirl like a child's toy, into a pattern, a design almost beautiful, as if an inspired choreographer had drilled a willing and patient and hard-working troupe of dancers—a pattern, design which was trying to tell him something, say something to him urgent and important and true in that second before, already bulging with the motion and the speed, it began to disintegrate and dissolve.

The Sports Illustrated vault has a couple of articles on/by William Faulkner. The first, taken from the issue shown above, covers Faulkner watching his first hockey game: An Innocent at Rinkside.

The second article is by Whitney Tower, recalling what it was like to experience the Kentucky Derby with Faulkner and other writers over the years: Prose for the Roses. Fortunately it wasn't a gonzo experience: "Despite the warnings about his fondness for bourbon and fears that he might not do his work in Louisville, Faulkner performed with precision and, god knows, distinction."