The Only Game in Town Read online

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  “Sometimes we sell them, lady, but only to other teams.”

  To Roger Angell

  CONTENTS

  Introduction • DAVID REMNICK

  PART ONE: FROM THE BLEACHERS

  The Web of the Game • ROGER ANGELL

  Ahab and Nemesis • A. J. LIEBLING

  Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu • JOHN UPDIKE

  The Only Games in Town • ANTHONY LANE

  Race Track • BILL BARICH

  PART TWO: IMMORTALS

  A Sense of Where You Are • JOHN MCPHEE

  El Único Matador • LILLIAN ROSS

  Net Worth • HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

  The Long Ride • MICHAEL SPECTER

  Born Slippy • JOHN SEABROOK

  The Chosen One • DAVID OWEN

  Legend of a Sport • ALVA JOHNSTON

  A Man-Child in Lotusland • REBECCA MEAD

  PART THREE: PERSONAL BEST

  Dangerous Game • NICK PAUMGARTEN

  The Running Novelist • HARUKI MURAKAMI

  Back to the Basement • NANCY FRANKLIN

  Playing Doc’s Games • WILLIAM FINNEGAN

  Last of the Metrozoids • ADAM GOPNIK

  The Sandy Frazier Dream Team • IAN FRAZIER

  PART FOUR: A DEEPER GAME

  Br’er Rabbit Ball • RING LARDNER

  The Greens of Ireland • HERBERT WARREN WIND

  Tennis Personalities • MARTIN AMIS

  Project Knuckleball • BEN MCGRATH

  Game Plan • DON DELILLO

  The Art of Failure • MALCOLM GLADWELL

  PART FIVE: OUT OF LEFT FIELD

  Swimming with Sharks • CHARLES SPRAWSON

  The National Pastime • JOHN CHEEVER

  SNO • CALVIN TRILLIN

  Musher • SUSAN ORLEAN

  Home and Away • PETER HESSLER

  No Obstacles • ALEC WILKINSON

  A Stud’s Life • KEVIN CONLEY

  INTRODUCTION

  DAVID REMNICK

  Twenty-eight years ago, at The Washington Post, adorned with the boiler-room rank of summer intern, I was dispatched to a dim Italian restaurant in the suburbs to interview a writer who was coming through town on a promotional book tour. The book was a collection of baseball pieces called Late Innings. The writer was Roger Angell. Like any reader of The New Yorker, I felt that I knew him through his work, a jauntily projected self so thoroughly at his ease, so companionable, that you thought of him as just the sort of brilliant friend with whom you’d want to share an afternoon at the stadium. His is a narrative voice thrilled by the simple, daily pleasures of being in the presence of an endlessly fascinating game and its heroic and fallible practitioners. He is erudite yet unpretentious, literate but not arty, with a tone of such buoyancy that to read one of his opening paragraphs is to step into a cool pond on a hot summer’s day.

  While I was delighted, if nervous, to meet Angell at this dark den of macaroni, I could not quite find him at first, so gloomy was the room. After some frantic searching among the plaster pillars and the Chianti bottles, I found him at last, sitting alone, a dapper mustachioed gent in his early sixties, drumming his fingers on the table and lightly tapping a cordovan penny loafer.

  Roger is somewhat forbidding on first meeting. And for good reason. Not only is he a writer of sterling reputation—certainly the best to devote himself so thoroughly to sport—he also has habits that do not immediately suggest a warm invitation. Later, at the magazine, I’ve noticed, as everyone has, that as he walks the halls, he is like Blazes Boylan, Molly’s vital lover in Ulysses, who “rattled merry money in his trousers’ pocket.”

  In fact, Angell is hardly cocky. He is friendly, voluble, sensitive, and perhaps never happier than when he is engaged in baseball talk. That day we first met in D.C., he had just got back from a trip to Boston and an evening at Fenway Park. You’d have thought he had just seen the place for the first time. Using sugar packets, toothpicks, and a salt shaker, he undertook a tabletop description of the odd contours of the stadium, the myriad angles of the outfield wall—twenty-two or so, he reckoned: “There’s this one spot with such a sharp angle that if the ball gets caught between it it keeps hitting back and forth—whack, whack, whack. Fantastic!”

  Angell began covering baseball for the magazine in 1962, the same year the Mets took their first wobbly steps. Angell, who came to his rookie season with many years of experience as a fan, got off to a more sure-footed start. No Marvelous Marv Throneberry he. Angell was, and remains, a kind of Burkean idealist—wary of heedless change yet open to surprise and displays of individual genius. As a stylist, he is unpoetic; that is, he does not dip his brush in the lit’ry goo that mars the work of some press-box masters. His sentences have a tensile zing. He is never maudlin—not even about the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  The New Yorker is not known foremost for its sports writing. Despite his eminence, Roger’s seat in the press box at Yankee Stadium is not reliably better than the sidebar man’s from the Asbury Park Press. I was once eating lunch in a Las Vegas casino with a few hours to kill before going to cover the Mike Tyson–Evander Holyfield fight. (Tyson saved room at lunch to snack later that night on Holyfield’s right ear.) A couple from Houston noticed the dinner-plate-size press credential around my neck and asked what paper I was from. “Not a paper,” I said. “I’m from The New Yorker.” They were aghast. “We’ve been reading The New Yorker for years,” the woman said, “but we never thought the magazine would stoop so low as to cover something so vulgar!” I remind you that she delivered this lecture on vulgarity in a casino. In Las Vegas.

  Angell’s closest press-box peer at the magazine was A. J. Liebling, whose consuming obsession (when he wasn’t seated in front of a mountainous côte de boeuf) was the prize ring. Liebling’s comic invention was to marry the high tone of his hero, the Regency-era chronicler Pierce Egan, with the homely characters of the ring itself.

  It is often said that John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”—an account of Ted Williams’s last day on the field—is the best baseball piece ever written (or, at least, once you take Angell out of play). It is also the only one he ever wrote for the magazine. Updike accomplished his ode to Williams in a flash—an aberration for the magazine in those days—and, ever since, the piece has held a place in the deadline hall of fame. Similarly, in the unbeatable category, John McPhee, when he was just starting out as a writer, portrayed Bill Bradley at his peak—a serious-minded Princeton undergraduate willing and able to explain in granular detail how an athlete goes about turning constant practice into instinct.

  The oldest piece of writing in the collection is Ring Lardner’s comic gem from 1930, “Br’er Rabbit Ball.” Another piece from the early days of the magazine is an overlooked masterpiece, Alva Johnston’s profile of Wilson Mizner, a turn-of-the century playwright and con man, who built a boxing gym in his wife’s mansion and then fled the mansion—and his wife, “the forty-million-dollar widow”—for Goldfield, Nevada, where he hung out at the training camps of Joe Gans and Battling Nelson. Some of the more recent entries include Profiles of contemporary icons: Rebecca Mead on Shaquille O’Neal; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., on Michael Jordan; Mich
ael Specter on Lance Armstrong; and David Owen on Tiger Woods, back in the innocent days when golf was the only thing he was famous for. There are also explorations of some of the stranger pursuits in sport: Lillian Ross on Sidney Franklin, easily the greatest matador ever to hail from the Brooklyn area; Nick Paumgarten on his aunt, who gave her life for the love of an early version of extreme skiing; Susan Orlean on Susan Butcher, queen of the Alaskan dog mushers; and Charles Sprawson on Lynne Cox, who has swum from Russia to America and in the slushy seas of the Antarctic.

  As usual, I have depended on my colleagues at the magazine for invaluable advice on their own favorites—and on my esteemed colleague Leo Carey for much more than that. Leo not only made numerous and wonderful suggestions; he also edited to consumable, if not bite-size, length the few pieces here that could not be published in full. Our librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, dug out the pieces—and many more—from the archives. Pam McCarthy dealt with our friends at Random House. Katherine Stirling and Brenda Phipps did for me what they always do—and with grace. My gratitude to all.

  And Roger Angell—well, all that he has done in six decades at The New Yorker is set the standard as writer, editor, and colleague. From us to you, Roger: the wave, the cheer, the big standing O.

  PART ONE

  FROM THE BLEACHERS

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, forget it, Beasley. Play another one.”

  THE WEB OF THE GAME

  ROGER ANGELL

  An afternoon in mid-May, and we are waiting for the game to begin. We are in shadow, and the sunlit field before us is a thick, springy green—an old diamond, beautifully kept up. The grass continues beyond the low chain-link fence that encloses the outfield, extending itself on the right-field side into a rougher, featureless sward that terminates in a low line of distant trees, still showing a pale, early-summer green. We are almost in the country. Our seats are in the seventh row of the grandstand, on the home side of the diamond, about halfway between third base and home plate. The seats themselves are more comforting to spirit than to body, being a surviving variant example of the pure late-Doric Polo Grounds mode: the backs made of a continuous running row of wood slats, divided off by pairs of narrow cast-iron arms, within which are slatted let-down seats, grown arthritic with rust and countless layers of gray paint. The rows are stacked so closely upon each other (one discovers) that a happening on the field of sufficient interest to warrant a rise or half-rise to one’s feet is often made more memorable by a sharp crack to the kneecaps delivered by the backs of the seats just forward; in time, one finds that a dandruff of gray paint flakes from the same source has fallen on one’s lap and scorecard. None of this matters, for this view and these stands and this park—it is Yale Field, in New Haven—are renowned for their felicity. The grandstand is a low, penumbrous steel-post shed that holds the infield in a pleasant horseshoe-curved embrace. The back wall of the grandstand, behind the uppermost row of seats, is broken by an arcade of open arches, admitting a soft backlight that silhouettes the upper audience and also discloses an overhead bonework of struts and beams supporting the roof—the pigeonland of all the ballparks of our youth. The game we are waiting for—Yale vs. St. John’s University—is a considerable event, for it is part of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s northeast regional tournament, the winner of which will qualify for a berth at the national collegiate championships in Omaha in June, the World Series of college baseball. Another pair of teams, Maine and Central Michigan—the Black Bears and the Chippewas—have just finished their game here, the first of a doubleheader. Maine won it, 10–2, but the ultimate winner will not be picked here for three more days, when the four teams will have completed a difficult double-elimination tournament. Good, hard competition, but the stands at Yale Field are half empty today. Call them half full, because everyone on hand—some twenty-five hundred fans—must know something about the quality of the teams here, or at least enough to qualify either as a partisan or as an expert, which would explain the hum of talk and expectation that runs through the grandstand even while the Yale team, in pinstriped home whites, is still taking infield practice.

  I am seated in a little sector of senior New Haven men—Townies rather than Old Elis. One of them a couple of rows in front of me says, “They used to fill this place in the old days, before there was all the baseball on TV.”

  His neighbor, a small man in a tweed cap, says, “The biggest crowd I ever saw in here—the biggest ever, I bet—was for a high school game. Shelton and Naugatuck, about twenty years ago.”

  An old gent with a cane, seated just to my left, says, “They filled it up that day the Yankees came here, with Ruth and Gehrig and the rest of them. An exhibition game.”

  A fan just beyond the old gentleman—a good-looking man in his sixties, with an open, friendly face, a large smile, and a thick stand of gray hair—leans toward my neighbor and says, “When was that game, Joe? 1930? 1932?”

  “Oh, I can’t remember,” the old man says. “Somewhere in there. My youngest son was mascot for the Yankees that day, so I could figure it out, I suppose.” He is not much interested. His eyes are on the field. “Say, look at these fellows throw!” he says. “Did you see that outfielder peg in the ball?”

  “That was the day Babe Ruth said this was about the best-looking ballpark he’d ever ever seen,” the man beyond says. “You remember that.”

  “I can remember long before this park was built,” the old man says. “It was already the Yale ballfield when I got here, but they put in these stands later—Who is this shortstop? He’s a hefty-looking bird.”

  “How many Yale games do you think you’ve seen, Joe?” the smiling man asks.

  “Oh, I couldn’t begin to count them. But I haven’t seen a Yale team play in—I don’t know how long. Not for years. These fellows today, they play in the Cape Cod League in the summers. They let the freshmen play here now, too. They recruit them more, I suppose. They’re athletes—you can see that.”

  The Yale team finishes its warmup ritual, and St. John’s—light gray uniforms with scarlet cap bills and scarlet socks—replaces it on the field.

  “St. John’s has always had a good club,” the old man tells me. “Even back when my sons were playing ball, it was a good ball team. But not as good as this one. Oh, my! Did you see this catcher throw down to second? Did you see that! I bet you in all the years I was here I didn’t have twenty fellows who could throw.”

  “Your sons played here?” I ask him. “For Yale?”

  “My son Joe was captain in ’41,” he says. “He was a pitcher. He pitched against my son Steve here one day. Steve was pitching for Colgate, and my other son, Bob—my youngest—was on the same Colgate team. A good little left-handed first baseman.”

  I am about to ask how that game turned out, but the old man has taken out a small gold pocket watch, with a hunting case, which he snaps open. Three-fourteen. “Can’t they get this started?” he says impatiently.

  I say something admiring about the watch, and he hands it to me carefully. “I’ve had that watch for sixty-eight years,” he says. “I always carried it in my vest pocket, back when we wore vests.”

  The little watch has a considerable heft to it: a weight of authority. I turn it over and find an inscription on the back. It is in script and a bit worn, but I can still make it out:

  PRESENTED TO JOE WOOD

  BY HIS FRIEND A. E. SMITH

  IN APPRECIATION OF HIS SPLENDID

  PITCHING WHICH BROUGHT THE

  WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP

  TO BOSTON IN 1912.

  “Who was A. E. Smith, Mr. Wood?” I ask.

  “He was a manufacturer.”

  I know the rest. Joe Wood, the old gentleman on my left, was the baseball coach at Yale for twenty years—from 1923 to 1942. Before that, he was a sometime outfielder for the Cleveland Indians, who batted .366 in 1921. Before that, he was a celebrated right-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox—Smokey Joe Wood, who won thirty-four games fo
r the Bosox in 1912, when he finished up with a record of 34-5, pitching ten shutouts and sixteen consecutive victories along the way. In the World Series that fall—one of the two or three finest ever played—he won three of the four games he pitched, including the famous finale: the game of Hooper’s catch and Snodgrass’s muff and Tris Speaker’s killing tenth-inning single. Next to Walter Johnson, Smokey Joe Wood was the most famous fastballer of his era. Still is, no doubt, in the minds of the few surviving fans who saw him at his best. He is ninety-one years old.

  None of this, I should explain—neither my presence at the game nor my companions in the stands—was an accident. I had been a fervent admirer of Smokey Joe Wood ever since I read his account of his baseball beginnings and his subsequent career in Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times, a cherished, classic volume of oral history of the early days of the pastime. Mr. Wood was in his seventies when that book was published, in 1966, and I was startled and pleased a few weeks ago when I ran across an article by Joan Whaley, in Baseball Digest, which informed me that he was still hale and still talking baseball in stimulating fashion. He was living with a married daughter in New Haven, and my first impulse was to jump in my car and drive up to press a call. But something held me back; it did not seem quite right to present myself uninvited at his door, even as a pilgrim. Then Ron Darling and Frank Viola gave me my chance. Darling, who was a junior at Yale this past year, is the best pitcher ever to take the mound for the Blue. He is better than Johnny Broaca, who went on to pitch for the Yankees and the Indians for five seasons in the mid-1930s; he is better than Frank Quinn, who compiled a 1.57 career earned-run average at Yale in 1946, ’47, and ’48. (He is also a better all-around ballplayer than George Bush, who played first base and captained the Elis in 1948, and then somehow drifted off into politics instead of baseball.) Darling, a right-handed fastball thrower, won eleven games and lost two as a sophomore, with an earned-run average of 1.31, and this year he was 9-3 and 2.42, with eighty-nine strikeouts in his ninety-three innings of work—the finest college pitcher in the Northeast, according to major-league scouts, with the possible exception of Frank Viola, a junior left-handed curveball ace at St. John’s, who was undefeated this year, 9-0, and had a neat earned-run average of 1.00. St. John’s, a Catholic university in Queens, is almost a baseball powerhouse—not quite in the same class, perhaps, as such perennial national champions or challengers as Arizona, Arizona State, UCLA, and Southern California, whose teams play Sun Belt schedules of close to sixty games, but good enough to have gone as the Northeast’s representative to the national tournament in Omaha in 1980, where Viola defeated the eventual winner, Arizona, in the first round. St. John’s, by the way, does not recruit high school stars from faraway states, as do most of these rival college powers; all but one player on this year’s thirty-three-man Redmen squad grew up and went to school in New York City or in nearby suburbs. This 1981 St. John’s team ran off an awesome 31-2 record, capturing the Eastern College Metro (Greater New York, that is) elimination, while Yale, winning its last nine games in a row, concluded its regular season with a record of 24-12-1, which was good enough to win its first Eastern Intercollegiate League championship since 1956. (That tie in Yale’s record was a game against the University of Central Florida, played during the Elis’ spring-training tour in March, and was called because of darkness after seven innings, with the score tied at 21–21. Darling did not pitch that day.) The two teams, along with Central Michigan (Mid-America Conference) and Maine (New England Conference), qualified for the tournament at New Haven, and the luck of the draw pitted Yale (and Darling) against St. John’s (and Viola) in the second game of the opening doubleheader. Perfect. Darling, by the way, had indicated that he might be willing to turn professional this summer if he were to be picked in an early round of the annual amateur draft conducted by the major leagues in mid-June, and Viola had been talked about as a potential big-leaguer ever since his freshman year, so their matchup suddenly became an obligatory reunion for every front-rank baseball scout east of the Ohio River. (About fifty of them turned up, with their speed-guns and clipboards, and their glowing reports of the game, I learned later, altered the draft priorities of several clubs.)