Bee’s twenty-four novels, one published posthumously, follow the clean-cut All-American athlete Chip Hilton from high school to college. As a coach, Bee sometimes stretched the boundaries of fair play to win. While coaching basketball at Rider University, he’d shorten or lengthen the team’s home court depending on which way would stifle opponents. Chip Hilton won a lot, too, but never had to resort to such tactics. He was an ideal sportsman who played fair and hard. When Chip lost, it was usually a fluke: In 1950’s Hoop Crazy, Chip’s basketball team loses on a play where the ball deflates in mid-air and hangs over the rim, allowing a player from the rival team to tap in a buzzer beater. Readers loved these books. When Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum, who read the Hilton books as a child, profiled Bee in 1980, the magazine received 130 letters from people who similarly devoured Chip Hilton stories.
The Hilton books were engaging enough to be adored by young readers. But they were also bland. There is little dramatic tension in a series where the protagonist nearly always wins. When Chip is injured—such as the time his leg is broken in a car accident in 1948’s Championship Ball—he becomes team manager and is so instrumental to his basketball team’s state championship that he gets the game ball despite not playing a minute all year. The books occasionally touch on bigger issues: Hoop Crazy deals with a town’s opposition to a Black player joining a team. But sport drives the action, and Chip is always a saint.
Tunis’ books, by contrast, featured main characters with rougher edges. “These are not just children’s action-and-adventure morality plays of the good guys coming from behind to win at the tape or in the final minute,” one Los Angeles Times critic wrote in 1991. “The good guys have faults. The bad guys have virtues. Characters change as situations change and they learn, as do the readers, the lessons of humanity.” Take Tunis’ 1938 novel, Iron Duke, his first book for young readers. The story follows Jimmy Wellington, an Iowa boy who has trouble adjusting to life at Harvard and eventually finds himself on the track team. I found this description of a two-mile race in the novel particularly well done:
Afterward he couldn’t remember much about that race except pain. Pain and the cinders from the men ahead which cut into his legs as he ran. It was nine minutes of steady pain, for the pace was fast. Inexperienced as he was, he knew that. Somewhere about the fourth or fifth lap by desperate running he managed to get up behind Whitney. Then he recalled noticing Whitney after a while fading away. Yes, actually dropping off until only that cursed blue figure remained ahead. Aching legs, tortured lungs, and an everlasting wrangle with that blue jersey on a curve. Arms up, elbows, elbows.