Paternity and Posterity

In The Sport of Kings, C.E. Morgan explores paternal relationships and their multigenerational impact.  These relationships function not only as plot devices, but also as an anecdotal answer to Morgan’s central question– “How far away from your father can you run?” (Morgan 1).

Allmon Shaugnessy’s father, Mike, has been absent nearly his son’s entire life.  Allmon consistently longs for his father to return, but also resents him for abandoning his family and allowing him and his mother, Marie, to sink into the cycle of poverty and desperation that is so prevalent in their city.  In this sense, despite the physical distance between them, Allmon can never escape his father’s wide reach– his everyday life has the fingerprints of Mike all over it.  Mike’s absence means that their family doesn’t have enough income to be well-fed and healthy.  Mike’s absence means that Allmon has to run drugs to provide for his mother.  Mike’s absence means that Allmon has no real way out and ends up in a detention center.  Mike’s absence means that Allmon is seemingly fated to “be a statistic” (Morgan 284).

However, Allmon evades fate.  After being released from minimum-security as a trained horse groomer, he is hired for his position on Forge Run Farm and his father’s absence is no longer in control of his life.  He has Henrietta, and he is able to do something he’s good at.  He has a stable income and is not in grave danger of falling back into his previous cycle of inescapable drug deals and imprisonment.  He gains the title of Hellmouth’s groomer and a promise of plentiful earnings.  Nevertheless, his father catches up to him.

When Allmon learns that Samuel is his child, he experiences a resurgence of the sense of desperation that plagued his fatherless childhood and he decides to take matters into his own hands.  Allmon is once again controlled by his father’s legacy, seeing this as yet another situation in which he cannot “beat the system” because he was never enabled to before.  After he lets Henry live, realizing that the police will come for him and he will inevitably be detained again, Allmon seems to realize that the only way he can stop the cycle is death.  Allmon’s death seems to point to a theme in The Sport of Kings– while we can alter our fate, it is ultimately very difficult to escape.   

Allmon is unable to run far from his father because Mike’s absence almost entirely shaped Allmon’s childhood and adolescence.  One could argue that Allmon returning to prison is inevitable, and that he was bound to die if he didn’t return.  However, Allmon’s decision to escape “the system”, and thus his father’s lasting impact on his life, could also be seen as a final deed to counteract fate and end his family’s sentence to a seemingly unavoidable life of poverty and crime.