Chris Crutcher was surprised when he first heard someone describe him as a sports fiction writer. "I grew up reading a sports version of the Hardy Boys and so that's what I thought sports books were. I never thought of myself as wanting to tell a sports story, but I'm comfortable with sports."

Crutcher is a sports translator, transforming sports into an idiom for life, making the spirit and power of sports understandable to enthusisasts and non-enthusiasts. For most of his growing up, sports was Crutcher's life. "I grew up in a little town, 80 miles from the nearest movie, where that's all there was to do. If you didn't come out for a sport, they showed up at your house. It was a question of deciding if you wanted to get beat up in pads or without pads. So I grew up with an overinflated sense of the importance of sports."

Sports always figure in his young adult novels books. In Stotan swimmers are "hard guys who feel no pain try it out in the real world." (Ages 12 and up; Greenwillow, $10.25; Dell, $3.25) The Crazy Horse Electric Game tells of a perfect athelete who meets with accident that ruins his balance, his image of himself, and results in search for redefinition. (Ages 12 and up; Greenwillow, $10.25; Dell 3.25) In Runing Loose, Louie leans about love, death, sportsmanship, and integrity as well as football. (Ages 12 and up; Greenwillow, $13.95; Dell, $2.95) Athletic Shorts is a collection of short stories which feature some of his former protagonists in new stories and fascinating new characters in an abundance of sports settings. (Ages 12 to adult; Greenwillow, $13.95)

His newest book, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes (Greenwillow, $14.00) features swimmer Eric Calhoune, alias Moby. Moby begins swimming in high school after years of fighting humiliation at being overweight. Weight and wit have bonded him in longterm friendship with Sarah Byrnes, a girl who's faced the shame of horrible facial burn scars she's borne since the age of three. Against a swimming backdrop Crutcher places the issues of shame, narrow mindedness, and abuse.

Though sports in this book is more frame than foreground, it's the glue that holds the book together. Crutcher choses elements of sports that have profound significance in both fiction and life. Crutcher places in the book a signifigant adult, the coach, Ms. Lemry, who also teaches a Contemporary American Thought (CAT) class. This was an intentional choice for Crutcher, "I wanted to get her as involved as possible in the overall picture. I put her in a place where I think coaches should be which is to deal with the physical the emotional and the mental." His model was an amalgamate character. She's based on a female coach with "an incredible winning percentage, but the thing that was incredible, was hearing what the kids said about her. I crossed her techniques with my own ideas and those of a child psychiatrist friend who's also a Buddist monk."

Ms. Lemry is adament that judgements and cruelty stay out of class and swimming. "I was always really angry when a coach tried to put out religious or patriotic considerations or any things but going out and doing your best, making your body go as hard and as far as it would go." Lemry uses this approach with both minds and bodies.

Then Crutcher chooses the athelete, Moby, a long distance swimmer. Moby's attitude to sports and life are a reflection of what Crutcher gleaned in his own training. "A lot goes on in your head when you're swimming sixty-six laps. In individual sports, you're really looking at your own resources all the time. There's a certain thing that goes on when you're really testing yourself and I think it goes on whether your testing yourself psychologically, emotionally, mentally or physically. If you can understand how it works physically, then you can probably help yourself out when you come up against hard times."

And Crutcher creates contest. There's Mark Brittain, a Fundamentalist swimmer, whose conceit and narrow upbringing confine and rule him. Moby enjoys psyching him out, and outside the pool pushes him to examine his false morality again and again.

Crutcher's his sports training has aided his writing. "I always thought that a lot of my great ideas and strengths came from competing. I used to find that place where I'd get in the zone and not get tired, and I feel that when I'm really interested in a conversation or psycological concept. I see myself as a writer in very much the same way I see myself as an athelet. When I get into a good story, then the story will carry itself."

Chris Crutcher's writing captures the playful side of sports and its sense of timing. Without mincing words, he composes harsh realities with images that sometimes take your breath away, sometimes make you belly-laugh in astonishment and delight. When Moby describes his absent, overweight father he's "not a guy who should have gone light on desserts and between meal snacks...(but) a guy who should have spread Super Glue on his lips before showing his face outside his bedroom each morning." Once the story takes hold and you move along at such a rapid clip that by the end you're holding on for dear life. Crutcher says that's how it feels writing them, too.

Part of this is effected by his counseling work. "My client load goes from ages 41/2 to 62 and I work with a fine play therapist. "It's eye opening and helpful for me as a writer to watch little kids do play therapy because their stories came out so clear. And then I realized that everyone's a story teller and then it's just a question of whether you want to do it and how you want to do it." And his writing feeds back into his counseling. "Writing makes you decide what you think about a given thing. Fiction tells more truth to me than non-fiction. I feel like I'm absolutely bound to my version of the truth of the situation--my version of how this works, so to that I've to understand it. So my writing helps me understand what I think about some of these really amazing things that I run into."

The horribly scarred protagonist Sarah Byrnes came to Crutcher from his counseling work. "I knew a person that had something similar happen who didin't make it...she gave it up to drugs and alchol--what would you have to do to make it." Sarah is also based on a badly burned boy Crutcher once saw and realized that as kids gathered around that this kid couldn't go anywhere without this attention. "Sarah made everyone call her by her full name. That was her salvation. I'm not going to let anybody get up on me...then when she faded away, scared, but she was really hiding out from her dad."

Another thing that comes from his counseling is viewing the result of unmet expectations, mostly society's expectations--about organized belief systems, about marriage, about family.

"I didn't have a tough childhood, but I was always really attentive to screwed up expectations and kids around me who didn't get a fair break." He's always worked with kids like this, maybe most poignantly at a school in Oakland. "We didn't cure a lot of kids, but we gave them a different experience. If you have that experience in your life then you have a chance when you get older, when you can go after your own resources, then you have a chance to make it. One thing I'm absolutely sure of as a therapist is that I'm not going to see what happens--my job is just to stick as much stuff in there as I can and let them see what happens."