Unless you count “Hop On Pop,” which I believe features an early form of parkour, the subject of sports is one largely missing from the Dr. Seuss catalog. But that was almost not the case. 40 years ago, Theodor Geisel began work on a 19-page sports-themed manuscript later finished by an assistant but never published.
Dr. Seuss’ Unpublished Sports Book Surfaces At Auction
↵Now it’s up for auction at Nate D. Sanders, where the current bid is $1,000. If you don’t feel like you can top that, go check out the rough sketches here, or just read the text highlighted below:
↵↵“All Sorts of Sports. Shall I play checkers? golf? croquet? There are so many games there are to play. I could. / maybe.. / shall I.. There are so many many sorts. So many sorts of games + sports. What am I going to do today? There are so many games to play! I guess I won’t. I’m all tired out. 100 GAMES & sports you can play. You can play checkers. You can play chess. Baseball. Football. Volleyball. Basketball. You can ski on snow. You can ski on water. And tiddle-de-winks. What am I going to do today. Well, that’s a simple matter. Oh, that’s easy. We could play. There are so many sports games to play. We could swim. I could play baseball...golf..or catch. Or I could play a tennis match. There are so many sports, let’s see... I could bowl, jump hurdles, or water ski. I could blumf. Or blumf blumf blumf blumf blumf. Or blumf. Or blumf blumf blumf blumf blumf.”
↵↵Blumf indeed. Blumf all day. Sadly, the project never got beyond the manuscript stage. Seuss revisited it years later but felt that readers would be turned off by how bumbling the protagonist, Pete, appears in the illustrations, as he’s constantly shown dropping balls and other things that Seuss says make him look like a “schnook.” Seeing as how no major sports stars I can think of would self-describe themselves that way, I guess he made the right call.
↵That said, please visit Rumph The Blumf, SB Nation’s blumf blog.
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