Splinter It would be John Updike’s eighty-second birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Updike_with_Bushes_new.jpg Neither for the first nor the last time, I’m going to summon up his tribute to Ted Williams: ‘…The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor…. …For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art…But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sports poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy…. …He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his bat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush… …Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished. Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didnt tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted We want Ted for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters….’ But read the whole thing. It’s one of the best pieces of sports writing I know; one of best pieces of any kind of writing about a certain time in American lives: baseball-almanac/articles/hub_fans_bid_kid_adieu_article.shtml And one marvellous late poem: Bird Caught in My Deer Netting The hedge must have seemed as ever, seeds and yew berries secreted beneath, small edible matter only a bird’s eye could see, mixed with the brown of shed needles and earth - a safe quiet cave such as nature affords the meek, entered low, on foot, the feathered head alert to what it sought, bright eyes darting everywhere but above, where net had been laid. Then, at some moment mercifully unwitnessed, an attempt to rise higher, to fly, met by an all but invisible limit, beating wings pinioned, deep instinct denied. The panicky thrashing and flutter, in daylight and air, their freedom impossibly close, all about! How many starved hours of struggle resumed in fits of life’s irritation did it take to seal and sew shut the berry-bright eyes and untie the tiny wild knot of a heart? I cannot know, discovering this wad of junco-fluff, weightless and wordless in its corner of netting deer cannot chew through nor gravity-defying bird bones break. So much more – please add your own.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:04:29 +0000
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