Kenny Cox devoted his life to wrestling: winning ten Oregon championships in collegiate, freestyle, and Greco-Roman and five junior national championships. But when his college career came to a close, Cox realized he wasn’t sure who he was or how to go about living his life. A few years later, he walked from Oregon to Mexico and back, and upon his return, sold his house and flew to Kauai, where he ventured deep into the wilderness and survived seventy days without supplies. Just weeks after reemerging from the wild, he died at the age of thirty-one.
Michael Copperman considers the life and untimely death of Cox, reconstructing memories of his former training partner with the help of Cox’s family, friends, fans, and fellow wrestlers. Seeking Kenny is, in part, an ode to a storied athlete. But it’s also a cautionary tale about the mental and bodily extremes Cox demanded for his achievements. Copperman asks what it means to live past one’s “glory days,” and what roles loss, grief, faith, and memory play when athletes leave pieces of themselves behind.
“It’s been years since I’ve read a book of narrative nonfiction as honest, compassionate, and wise as Seeking Kenny. A journalistic investigation, a touching biography, a meditation on sport, persistence, faith, the natural world, and the search for meaning—this is a book I’m going to hand to my son. This is a book, I’m going to tell him, that will help you become a man, a better man.”—Joe Wilkins, author, The Entire Sky
“What, in this generation, does it mean for a person to seek? To strive, to find . . . or simply not to yield? Seeking Kennyasks and begs the question in a narrative that merges biography and autobiography, memoir and testimony, and is presented in precise, poetic prose. The answer is gut-wrenching, thought-provoking, heart-rending . . . and incredibly moving.”—David Bradley, author, The Chaneysville Incident
“Through the life of his friend and fellow wrestler Kenny Cox, Michael Copperman takes an honest, visceral, and moving look at sports and masculinity in his stunning book Seeking Kenny. This is a beautiful story about the importance of friendship and bonding as well as the ways men often define themselves by their physical abilities. In vivid and moving prose, Copperman tells of one man’s search for a place like Eden. In the process, he guides the reader to meditate on their own life and longings.”—W. Ralph Eubanks, author, A Place Like Mississippi
“I don’t know whether it’s the intensity of the subject Michael Copperman has chosen (more likely, a subject that has chosen him) or the manner in which Copperman so vividly immerses the reader into the worlds of high school wrestling and Kenny Cox’s compelling and uncommon life, but Seeking Kenny urges you forward, moment by moment, page after page. And while Kenny left this Earth too soon, this book is one to celebrate, for its magisterial language, the many people brought so indelibly to life, and the engrossing but never easy answers to the questions it poses about American families, manhood, sport, identity, and their intersections. Truly one of a kind!”—Tom Williams, author, Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales
