REVIEW: 'Sting-Ray Afternoons,' by Steve Rushin

Steve Rushin, for most of the past 30 years, has been our guy at Sports Illustrated. Grew up in Bloomington. Hired at SI right out of Marquette University. At age 25, he was the lead writer of the story of the Twins' 1991 World Series title — a story he wrote in the basement of his childhood home on W. 96th Street.

His trademark: puns, palindromes, anagrams and all other manner of wordplay. The English language is like Silly Putty in his hands, often bending back on itself at the end of his columns. (Sample: A contract extension for Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was so long that by the end of it he'll "spend less time preparing for Wake than he does preparing for wakes.") First, you think: The wordplay distracts from the story. Then, you think: Man, I wish I could do that.

Now 50 and with a few sports books and a novel to his name, Rushin has come out with a memoir — but it's not about his years as a big-time sportswriter. "Sting-Ray Afternoons" is his story of growing up in Bloomington in the 1970s. It's a lighthearted, sentimental look back at a Minnesota childhood with a twist of wryness.

For Twin Cities readers, the book is rich with One of Us bona fides: Red Owl, Mann's Southtown, Shakey's Pizza, the Embers, "prestigious west Bloomington," listening for school closings from WCCO-AM's Boone and Erickson — and the strange plastic cling film on the soft drinks sold at Metropolitan Stadium, where the teenage Rushin worked in the food operation during the stadium's final years. (If you never ordered the popcorn at the Met … good call.)

That Sting-Ray in the title, the Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle, remained just beyond Rushin's reach, just like other aspirational youth targets such as Adidas Italias, Nike Cortezes and Levi's cords. With five young mouths to feed, the Rushins were more Sears than Dayton's.

The Rushins were Minneapolis Star readers, but Steve's real inspiration was closer to home. As he watched the Vikings lose Super Bowl XI to the Oakland Raiders in 1977, Rushin writes, his father noted the uniform of Oakland center Jim Otto: OTTO 00. "Look," Don Rushin said. "It's a palindrome." (Picky readers might point out that Otto retired in 1974, but it's still a good story.)

The Twin Cities in the 1970s, Rushin says with tongue only slightly in cheek, were like "Florence in the High Renaissance" — a time of Nerf footballs, Lucky Charms cereal and a burgeoning child population in Bloomington. But every golden age comes to an end, and for Rushin, the end comes early, around age 15, as the 1980s dawn, older siblings go off to college, and Met Stadium closes, soon to be followed by Rushin's Lincoln High School. He would graduate from Kennedy High, class of 1984.

At times "Sting-Ray Afternoons" is a little too much wandering through Rushin's cerebral attic, with esoteric detours into the origin stories of the Bic Cristal ballpoint pen and the Boeing 747.

But Rushin's told-with-a-smile stories of childhood are worth the trip: bundling into a snowmobile suit in winter, piling into the Ford LTD Country Squire for a cross-country summer vacation, making mild mischief with neighborhood friends, and one memorable disaster when nature called and wouldn't be kept waiting. All seen through that gauzy, yellowish filter that blurs memory with Dad's Super 8 movies.

Casey Common is an editor at the Star Tribune.

Sting-Ray Afternoons
By: Steve Rushin.
Publisher: Little, Brown, 336 pages, $27.
Event: 7 p.m., July 28, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av. S., Mpls.