Perhaps the Dragons need only to look as far as their own Hall of Fame to find their next men’s basketball coach. After all, an ex-Dragon with a classy vitae and an active rolodex that includes, among others, the names of Danny Ainge, Richard Attenborough, Sandra Bullock, M. L. Carr, Jacques René Chirac, former president of France, Vince Dooley, John Havlicek, K. C. Jones, Muriel Hemingway, Chris O’Donnell, Joe Paterno, Pierre Salinger, Hershel Walker and John Wooden might have an interest.
Yes, Dr. Jim Nagel would be an intriguing candidate, but it’s unlikely he’s ready to abandon his ongoing career as an English scholar of international acclaim.
“Indeed, when I retire in the next year or two, I may take a coaching job,” said Nagel. “I get contacted about it from time to time, but at the moment I have a book to finish before I think about other things. One college president commented to me that he thought it would be great if the basketball coach were the most widely published scholar in the entire institution. We will see.”
An endowed English professor at the University of Georgia, Nagel is a widely published author and international authority on American fiction, especially Ernest Hemingway. Nagel is credited with the screen play for the 1997 movie “In Love and War” that featured Bullock, the academy award-winning actress.
“I have served as president of the Hemingway Society, the Crane Society, and the new Society for the Study of the American Short Story,” said Nagel. “I am the executive coordinator of the major organization in the field, the American Literature Association, which I helped start. I edited 156 books in the Critical Essays series in addition to 22 of my own. And I edited a major scholarly journal for 20 years. All told, my name (as either author or editor) is in 750,000 copies of books in libraries around the world. My own scholarship is in print in 12 languages.”
A Breckenridge native, Dr. Nagel was a three-time All-Northern Intercollegiate Conference selection at Moorhead State College and the league basketball scoring king as a senior. Nagel scored 1,211 points in 87 games at Moorhead State and was enshrined in both the Dragon and NSIC Halls of Fame.
Nagel firmly believes sports, and basketball in particular, played a major role in shaping his life and career.
“Basketball has meant an enormous amount to me throughout my life, and my athletic background is certainly the key to who I am, what I value, how I function. I believe in hard work, fair play, and being true to your word. I admire achievement based on merit. I endorse Coach (John) Wooden’s observation that the key to athletic success is to make yourself worthy of winning.”
There are lessons to be learned from the game, Nagel insists, and subscribing to an unwritten code of conduct is a serious expectation.
“I believe in knocking the other guy down and helping him up, and I expect him to do both of those things for me. When a game is over, everyone should shake hands and congratulate those who played a good game, no matter which side they are on. The game is sacred; one contestant cannot be allowed to ruin it with a dirty play, a cheap shot, a deliberate injury to another player. Basketball is a beautiful game, athleticism at its highest elevation, and playing it well is a great thing to behold.”
Basketball has long had a serious grip on Nagel, and it started early.
“My earliest memory is of standing on the seat of an auditorium chair in Breckenridge cheering for my cousin when he scored a basket in 1944. I was three. Breckenridge had won the state in 1940 after losing in the semi-finals in 1939, and there were photos of the championship team in every store in town. I played lots of sports, but I slept with a basketball throughout my childhood. Even after football practice I would go out to a farm near town and shoot jump shots every evening up in the hayloft. I would mark the places and count groups of 25 shots and percentages. I would finish with 100 free throws.
“I got a rather late start in high school in the sense that I was in the hospital most of the summer before my sophomore year, and I weighed only 105 pounds when school started that year. I could not play football, of course, and I was weak and still recovering through the basketball season. My junior year I came on stronger, but defense and rebounding were the focus of my game since Lindy Kissell (the other forward) led the Lake Region Conference in scoring. My senior year I was moved to center and I won the conference scoring trophy and was MVP. I worked hard at the game because I loved it (still do), and I played at MS with guys who felt the same way about it.”
Nagel enrolled at MSC in 1958, and the real adventure began.
“I started several games as a freshman, but I had a lot to learn and some growing to do. The breakthrough came the next year during the Christmas tournament at Concordia when we played NDSU, led by All-American Marv Bachmeier. He was a beautiful guard with a great outside shot, and he had scored 55 points in an earlier game.”
“I had seen him play several times, and I admired him immensely. I wanted to try to outplay him, and I did. At halftime of our game, I had 21 points, and he had about seven. We won easily (I ended up with 28), and (coach) Larry MacLeod called me in for a chat and said some nice things. I led the team in scoring from that night forward.”
“Larry gave me confidence and support, and it meant a lot. My senior year he was at Indiana on sabbatical, but he wrote to me to say I was the only player he could remember to lead the conference in scoring and be selected as the MVP while serving as president of the student commission. I always thought he was a bright guy who was perceptive, interesting, and very funny.”
“MacLeod took a rather different approach to the game,” Nagel recalled. “Here the analysis of the strategy of the opposition was largely subordinated to team discipline, to the percentage shot, to strong defense, to rebounding, and a lot of important details not usually represented in newspaper summaries. . . He respected the intelligence of his players, and he did not encumber us with excessive controls. We knew always he regarded the academic integrity of the program as foremost in his relationship with us. . . In that climate basketball was important but subordinate to other concerns. We should represent the college and make a good showing, but primarily we should play for fun, for personal satisfaction, for friendship, for the sheer exhilaration of athletics.”
Sports played a prominent role in shaping Nagel’s career, but academics were always a major priority.
“In all honesty, I’m not sure I could say that sports did much for my education. Indeed, professionally I would be in better shape today if I had spent all those thousands of hours over the years studying French and German and reading the modern novel. In terms of personal development, however, sports were very important. I first found acceptance, self respect and a sense of myself in sports at Breckenridge. In college, basketball also helped me to feel I belonged to the institution, and I think whatever confidence and character I possess today came in large measure out of basketball and my year as president of the student commission.”
“My life has been a mixture of literature and athletics from the very beginning. I read my way through the complete works of Jack London when I was 12, and I was already hooked. English was my favorite subject in high school, and I knew when I came to Moorhead that it would be my major. I took Physical Education classes to cover coaching; I never wanted to teach it as my subject area.”
“At Moorhead State I took a course in the Modern Novel and read The Sun Also Rises. I wrote a paper about it, comparing it to The Great Gatsby in many respects: narrative method, structure, theme of lost idealism, etc. My professor, Richard Browne, had taught at Penn State and knew the world’s leading Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. Browne sent my paper to Phil, and he wrote to me, expressing appreciation for my work and encouraging me to come there and study with him as a graduate student. I did so.”
“In the middle of my grad program, my aunt (with whom I had lived throughout my childhood) had a stroke in Breckenridge, and somebody had to pay the bills. I took a job as an instructor at MS (1965-68) and got some great experience with a variety of classes, including the modern novel and a grad class on Hemingway and Faulkner. I also wrote a book during those years that came out the first year I was back working on my doctorate. I received my Ph.D. in English in 1971 and took a job at Northeastern University in Boston, which included the bonus of research privileges at Harvard, which has a great library.”
Nagel valued the stimulating academic setting at Northeastern and enjoyed pickup basketball games that often included some of the legendary former Boston Celtics.
“The Northeastern years were good for me. I taught mostly grad classes, and every year I gave a Hemingway seminar at the John F. Kennedy Library, which houses the Hemingway collection of manuscripts. My book on Stephen Crane (Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism) made me a full professor early in my career, and another book on Hemingway inspired Northeastern to make me a Distinguished Professor and to give me an endowed chair, the first ever in the humanities at that school. But I left Boston in 1991 to come to the University of Georgia to be Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature, a position that features reduced teaching (almost all grad courses), a huge expense account with a travel budget, and a great deal of work with doctoral students. I have enjoyed all of that a great deal.”
While basketball was clearly the game of choice for Nagel, he enjoyed his time on the tennis courts as well and still does.
“I was captain of the tennis team at Moorhead and came in second in the conference my junior year. Later, I coached the tennis team at MS for two years, stopping only my last year to study for a national competition for a three-year federal award to complete a Ph.D. I won it. It was called a National Defense Education Act Fellowship, and it saw me through the last three years of my Ph.D. program at Penn State.”
“I have played tennis steadily ever since I graduated, winning about 80 tournaments. My partner and I won the Massachusetts doubles championship three times when I taught up there. I was never as good as Larry Dodge, who played at NDSU, but I became a very competitive doubles player. Still. In Georgia, a hotbed of tennis, my partner and I were defeated twice in the finals of the state championship, thus coming in second two times.”
“I still play tennis twice a week, including USTA tournaments; I play golf, but not so well; and I am working on my skiing, which is difficult, living in Georgia. But I ski two or three weeks in the Rockies every year, and I would love to be a ski instructor, my long-range goal. I taught swimming seven years, starting at the pool a block from Alex Nemzek Hall. In short, I still love athletics just as much as I did at Moorhead State. I go to everything at UGA, and the quality of athletes I get to see is quite impressive.”
While his wonderful odyssey has carried him around the world, memories of his days in the Red River Valley are never far away.
“I know where I come from. I am a small-town Minnesota kid from a poor family, the first in the family to go to college. (Not so unusual in my generation.) No matter where I went or what I did, speaking at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, or to a United Nations committee in Italy, or lecturing to the doctoral students and faculty at the University of Heidelberg, I was a Dragon basketball player who loves literature.”
“The most fun I have had in my life was my years in Moorhead. I had wonderful buddies I liked and respected, and we played some good ball. It pleased me that my senior year I was selected as the MVP in the conference in basketball by a unanimous vote of the coaches. I also led the conference in scoring that year, setting records for most field goals. We had a good team, but we lacked a big center, which hurt in some crucial games.”
Nagel has no doubts about the impact MSUM has had on his life. “The strongest feelings I have about my years at Moorhead State are about the sense of community we all felt in those years. We were part of a school with a long history and a unique tradition; it was designed for us, and we were totally identified with it. We were scramblers in those days, poor kids from small towns and unsophisticated families who saw MS as our avenue to a meaningful career and a richer life in every sense. We came to know everyone at the college, faculty and students and staff, and the feeling of belonging was very strong.”
“As a professional, I have tried hard to be the best professor I can be. . . I think it important to have balance; I need the friendship of a group of guys; I love the physical workout. It is great for my health in all respects, and it has helped me continue to be productive through a long career. It is 48 years since I taught my first college English class. I am still one of the most popular teachers at the University of Georgia. So, I did nothing special to integrate sports and work except to live my life the way I enjoy it most. The last day I teach will be a very sad day for me. The last day I participate in a sport will be, I very much hope, the last day of my life.”
In “Basketball: A Personal Retrospective,” an essay that appeared in the Journal of American Culture, Nagel confesses his love affair with basketball and takes a deeper look at collegiate athletics.
“No one who saw me play basketball would have confused me with Larry Bird. Dr. J., I was not. . . The game I played was more modest in tone and decorum; it was a lot more calculated and precise, more of a team effort, and on a vastly different scale, although not nearly so spectacular to watch. I played small college basketball: that humble world of athletes an inch too short, a step too slow, a year too far behind in development to try for the big time. There were no scholarships, no one thought much about national championships, no one dreamed of the cover of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.”
Despite the problems that surround intercollegiate athletics today, Nagel still sees collegiate basketball as a most worthy experience.
“What ultimately emerges from a consideration of these points is the inescapable conclusion that for all the fun of collegiate athletics those of us who are involved in education must ensure their balanced role in university life. I should not like to deny to any student the unforgettable experiences I had in basketball, but I should not like to preclude any student from the solid academic background that can lead to a satisfying profession either. Basketball meant a lot to me, so much that when I stopped playing I could not go near the game for years. I do not think that I will drift on forever…but I don’t think I will ever be entirely comfortable with the idea that I can no longer play either. In our most sober moments, I doubt that any of us in academics can approach college athletics entirely free of ambivalence. Certainly I cannot. But if in the darkness I should at night be awakened by a strange figure who bids me follow, and if a gleaming court should suddenly appear, along with the slim friends of my youth, and we should glide weightlessly across the court, playing effortlessly with the wind in our hair and joy in our hearts, I would be hard pressed not to follow him forever, and I would never need another dream.”
Yes, Dr. Jim Nagel would be an intriguing candidate, but it’s unlikely he’s ready to abandon his ongoing career as an English scholar of international acclaim.
“Indeed, when I retire in the next year or two, I may take a coaching job,” said Nagel. “I get contacted about it from time to time, but at the moment I have a book to finish before I think about other things. One college president commented to me that he thought it would be great if the basketball coach were the most widely published scholar in the entire institution. We will see.”
An endowed English professor at the University of Georgia, Nagel is a widely published author and international authority on American fiction, especially Ernest Hemingway. Nagel is credited with the screen play for the 1997 movie “In Love and War” that featured Bullock, the academy award-winning actress.
“I have served as president of the Hemingway Society, the Crane Society, and the new Society for the Study of the American Short Story,” said Nagel. “I am the executive coordinator of the major organization in the field, the American Literature Association, which I helped start. I edited 156 books in the Critical Essays series in addition to 22 of my own. And I edited a major scholarly journal for 20 years. All told, my name (as either author or editor) is in 750,000 copies of books in libraries around the world. My own scholarship is in print in 12 languages.”
A Breckenridge native, Dr. Nagel was a three-time All-Northern Intercollegiate Conference selection at Moorhead State College and the league basketball scoring king as a senior. Nagel scored 1,211 points in 87 games at Moorhead State and was enshrined in both the Dragon and NSIC Halls of Fame.
Nagel firmly believes sports, and basketball in particular, played a major role in shaping his life and career.
“Basketball has meant an enormous amount to me throughout my life, and my athletic background is certainly the key to who I am, what I value, how I function. I believe in hard work, fair play, and being true to your word. I admire achievement based on merit. I endorse Coach (John) Wooden’s observation that the key to athletic success is to make yourself worthy of winning.”
There are lessons to be learned from the game, Nagel insists, and subscribing to an unwritten code of conduct is a serious expectation.
“I believe in knocking the other guy down and helping him up, and I expect him to do both of those things for me. When a game is over, everyone should shake hands and congratulate those who played a good game, no matter which side they are on. The game is sacred; one contestant cannot be allowed to ruin it with a dirty play, a cheap shot, a deliberate injury to another player. Basketball is a beautiful game, athleticism at its highest elevation, and playing it well is a great thing to behold.”
Basketball has long had a serious grip on Nagel, and it started early.
“My earliest memory is of standing on the seat of an auditorium chair in Breckenridge cheering for my cousin when he scored a basket in 1944. I was three. Breckenridge had won the state in 1940 after losing in the semi-finals in 1939, and there were photos of the championship team in every store in town. I played lots of sports, but I slept with a basketball throughout my childhood. Even after football practice I would go out to a farm near town and shoot jump shots every evening up in the hayloft. I would mark the places and count groups of 25 shots and percentages. I would finish with 100 free throws.
“I got a rather late start in high school in the sense that I was in the hospital most of the summer before my sophomore year, and I weighed only 105 pounds when school started that year. I could not play football, of course, and I was weak and still recovering through the basketball season. My junior year I came on stronger, but defense and rebounding were the focus of my game since Lindy Kissell (the other forward) led the Lake Region Conference in scoring. My senior year I was moved to center and I won the conference scoring trophy and was MVP. I worked hard at the game because I loved it (still do), and I played at MS with guys who felt the same way about it.”
Nagel enrolled at MSC in 1958, and the real adventure began.
“I started several games as a freshman, but I had a lot to learn and some growing to do. The breakthrough came the next year during the Christmas tournament at Concordia when we played NDSU, led by All-American Marv Bachmeier. He was a beautiful guard with a great outside shot, and he had scored 55 points in an earlier game.”
“I had seen him play several times, and I admired him immensely. I wanted to try to outplay him, and I did. At halftime of our game, I had 21 points, and he had about seven. We won easily (I ended up with 28), and (coach) Larry MacLeod called me in for a chat and said some nice things. I led the team in scoring from that night forward.”
“Larry gave me confidence and support, and it meant a lot. My senior year he was at Indiana on sabbatical, but he wrote to me to say I was the only player he could remember to lead the conference in scoring and be selected as the MVP while serving as president of the student commission. I always thought he was a bright guy who was perceptive, interesting, and very funny.”
“MacLeod took a rather different approach to the game,” Nagel recalled. “Here the analysis of the strategy of the opposition was largely subordinated to team discipline, to the percentage shot, to strong defense, to rebounding, and a lot of important details not usually represented in newspaper summaries. . . He respected the intelligence of his players, and he did not encumber us with excessive controls. We knew always he regarded the academic integrity of the program as foremost in his relationship with us. . . In that climate basketball was important but subordinate to other concerns. We should represent the college and make a good showing, but primarily we should play for fun, for personal satisfaction, for friendship, for the sheer exhilaration of athletics.”
Sports played a prominent role in shaping Nagel’s career, but academics were always a major priority.
“In all honesty, I’m not sure I could say that sports did much for my education. Indeed, professionally I would be in better shape today if I had spent all those thousands of hours over the years studying French and German and reading the modern novel. In terms of personal development, however, sports were very important. I first found acceptance, self respect and a sense of myself in sports at Breckenridge. In college, basketball also helped me to feel I belonged to the institution, and I think whatever confidence and character I possess today came in large measure out of basketball and my year as president of the student commission.”
“My life has been a mixture of literature and athletics from the very beginning. I read my way through the complete works of Jack London when I was 12, and I was already hooked. English was my favorite subject in high school, and I knew when I came to Moorhead that it would be my major. I took Physical Education classes to cover coaching; I never wanted to teach it as my subject area.”
“At Moorhead State I took a course in the Modern Novel and read The Sun Also Rises. I wrote a paper about it, comparing it to The Great Gatsby in many respects: narrative method, structure, theme of lost idealism, etc. My professor, Richard Browne, had taught at Penn State and knew the world’s leading Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. Browne sent my paper to Phil, and he wrote to me, expressing appreciation for my work and encouraging me to come there and study with him as a graduate student. I did so.”
“In the middle of my grad program, my aunt (with whom I had lived throughout my childhood) had a stroke in Breckenridge, and somebody had to pay the bills. I took a job as an instructor at MS (1965-68) and got some great experience with a variety of classes, including the modern novel and a grad class on Hemingway and Faulkner. I also wrote a book during those years that came out the first year I was back working on my doctorate. I received my Ph.D. in English in 1971 and took a job at Northeastern University in Boston, which included the bonus of research privileges at Harvard, which has a great library.”
Nagel valued the stimulating academic setting at Northeastern and enjoyed pickup basketball games that often included some of the legendary former Boston Celtics.
“The Northeastern years were good for me. I taught mostly grad classes, and every year I gave a Hemingway seminar at the John F. Kennedy Library, which houses the Hemingway collection of manuscripts. My book on Stephen Crane (Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism) made me a full professor early in my career, and another book on Hemingway inspired Northeastern to make me a Distinguished Professor and to give me an endowed chair, the first ever in the humanities at that school. But I left Boston in 1991 to come to the University of Georgia to be Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature, a position that features reduced teaching (almost all grad courses), a huge expense account with a travel budget, and a great deal of work with doctoral students. I have enjoyed all of that a great deal.”
While basketball was clearly the game of choice for Nagel, he enjoyed his time on the tennis courts as well and still does.
“I was captain of the tennis team at Moorhead and came in second in the conference my junior year. Later, I coached the tennis team at MS for two years, stopping only my last year to study for a national competition for a three-year federal award to complete a Ph.D. I won it. It was called a National Defense Education Act Fellowship, and it saw me through the last three years of my Ph.D. program at Penn State.”
“I have played tennis steadily ever since I graduated, winning about 80 tournaments. My partner and I won the Massachusetts doubles championship three times when I taught up there. I was never as good as Larry Dodge, who played at NDSU, but I became a very competitive doubles player. Still. In Georgia, a hotbed of tennis, my partner and I were defeated twice in the finals of the state championship, thus coming in second two times.”
“I still play tennis twice a week, including USTA tournaments; I play golf, but not so well; and I am working on my skiing, which is difficult, living in Georgia. But I ski two or three weeks in the Rockies every year, and I would love to be a ski instructor, my long-range goal. I taught swimming seven years, starting at the pool a block from Alex Nemzek Hall. In short, I still love athletics just as much as I did at Moorhead State. I go to everything at UGA, and the quality of athletes I get to see is quite impressive.”
While his wonderful odyssey has carried him around the world, memories of his days in the Red River Valley are never far away.
“I know where I come from. I am a small-town Minnesota kid from a poor family, the first in the family to go to college. (Not so unusual in my generation.) No matter where I went or what I did, speaking at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, or to a United Nations committee in Italy, or lecturing to the doctoral students and faculty at the University of Heidelberg, I was a Dragon basketball player who loves literature.”
“The most fun I have had in my life was my years in Moorhead. I had wonderful buddies I liked and respected, and we played some good ball. It pleased me that my senior year I was selected as the MVP in the conference in basketball by a unanimous vote of the coaches. I also led the conference in scoring that year, setting records for most field goals. We had a good team, but we lacked a big center, which hurt in some crucial games.”
Nagel has no doubts about the impact MSUM has had on his life. “The strongest feelings I have about my years at Moorhead State are about the sense of community we all felt in those years. We were part of a school with a long history and a unique tradition; it was designed for us, and we were totally identified with it. We were scramblers in those days, poor kids from small towns and unsophisticated families who saw MS as our avenue to a meaningful career and a richer life in every sense. We came to know everyone at the college, faculty and students and staff, and the feeling of belonging was very strong.”
“As a professional, I have tried hard to be the best professor I can be. . . I think it important to have balance; I need the friendship of a group of guys; I love the physical workout. It is great for my health in all respects, and it has helped me continue to be productive through a long career. It is 48 years since I taught my first college English class. I am still one of the most popular teachers at the University of Georgia. So, I did nothing special to integrate sports and work except to live my life the way I enjoy it most. The last day I teach will be a very sad day for me. The last day I participate in a sport will be, I very much hope, the last day of my life.”
In “Basketball: A Personal Retrospective,” an essay that appeared in the Journal of American Culture, Nagel confesses his love affair with basketball and takes a deeper look at collegiate athletics.
“No one who saw me play basketball would have confused me with Larry Bird. Dr. J., I was not. . . The game I played was more modest in tone and decorum; it was a lot more calculated and precise, more of a team effort, and on a vastly different scale, although not nearly so spectacular to watch. I played small college basketball: that humble world of athletes an inch too short, a step too slow, a year too far behind in development to try for the big time. There were no scholarships, no one thought much about national championships, no one dreamed of the cover of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.”
Despite the problems that surround intercollegiate athletics today, Nagel still sees collegiate basketball as a most worthy experience.
“What ultimately emerges from a consideration of these points is the inescapable conclusion that for all the fun of collegiate athletics those of us who are involved in education must ensure their balanced role in university life. I should not like to deny to any student the unforgettable experiences I had in basketball, but I should not like to preclude any student from the solid academic background that can lead to a satisfying profession either. Basketball meant a lot to me, so much that when I stopped playing I could not go near the game for years. I do not think that I will drift on forever…but I don’t think I will ever be entirely comfortable with the idea that I can no longer play either. In our most sober moments, I doubt that any of us in academics can approach college athletics entirely free of ambivalence. Certainly I cannot. But if in the darkness I should at night be awakened by a strange figure who bids me follow, and if a gleaming court should suddenly appear, along with the slim friends of my youth, and we should glide weightlessly across the court, playing effortlessly with the wind in our hair and joy in our hearts, I would be hard pressed not to follow him forever, and I would never need another dream.”
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