The Only Game in Town Read online

  One of the collegiate voices behind me said, “He looks old, doesn’t he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face…”

  “Yeah,” the other voice said, “but he looks like an old hawk, doesn’t he?”

  With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout “Steal home! Go, go!” Williams’ speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

  “Boy, he was really loafing, wasn’t he?” one of the boys behind me said.

  “It’s cold,” the other explained. “He doesn’t play well when it’s cold. He likes heat. He’s a hedonist.”

  The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn’t budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams’ recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4–2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins’ string of test balloons.

  Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter’s box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big “380” painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, “I didn’t think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren’t good.”)

  The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. 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 somber 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 signaled 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.

  Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

  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 didn’t 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.

  Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams’ miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his left-field position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

  One of the scholasticists behind me said, “Let’s go. We’ve seen everything. I don’t want to spoil it.” This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams’ last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams’ homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4–3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinch-hitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a doubleplay ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex–Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5–4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

  1960

  THE ONLY GAMES IN TOWN

  ANTHONY LANE

  According to Pythagoras, there were three types of m
en, just as there were three types of visitors to the Olympic Games. First and lowest were those who came to sell. Next, halfway up, were the competitors. And last, at the top of the pile, were the people who wanted to watch. The more you look at this ranking, the better it gets. Applied to life, it means a shoo-in for the slacker, the couch potato, and the tremulous voyeur. Applied to the Olympic Games, it makes it simpler for ordinary mortals to gaze upon Michael Phelps—half man, half osprey, with a wingspan three inches greater than his height. “To be honest, I had no idea I was going to go that fast,” he said, addressing a press conference as if it were a bunch of traffic cops. The date was August 10, the place was Beijing, and Phelps had just spent a relaxing Sunday morning in the pool, slicing more than a second off his own world record. The event was the men’s four-hundred-meter individual medley, in which swimmers are encouraged to prove that, short of dropping depth charges, there is nothing they can’t do in the water. Nonetheless, all Phelps did was take a dip, whereas those of us lining the National Aquatics Center were the gods of the Games, the spectators, and that lifted us higher than him. Ask Pythagoras.

  The victory was not without its hiccups. Phelps stepped onto the winner’s podium, flanked by his compatriot Ryan Lochte, who had taken the bronze. (It’s the old Ben Jonson problem: You’re a fine playwright, and at any other time you’d be the best, but by lousy luck you happen to overlap with Shakespeare, who takes gold in every medley in town.) It was time for the winner’s national anthem, which began with an ominous pop, settled down for a while, gathered itself for the finale, and then stopped. We got the land of the free, but apparently the home of the brave was no longer available. Did someone foreclose? Accidents will happen, but, as a rule, if you’re going to screw up the national anthem of another country, especially a major trading partner, try not to do so when the president of that country is in the audience. George W. Bush was indeed in the Aquatics Center, standing at attention, and, even across ten lanes of water, I could tell that I was looking at a confused man. Was this insult calculated, and how should he react? The world held its breath. Somewhere nearby was a briefcase with the nuclear launch codes, possibly held by a man wearing trunks. The crisis passed. The president sat down. The semifinals of the women’s hundred-meter butterfly got under way. As for the Assistant Button-Pressing Technical Manager for National Anthem Digital Recording Systems (Aquatic Branch), I don’t know the poor fellow’s name, but his extended family has just been rehoused inside a hydroelectric dam.

  The first week of the twenty-ninth Olympiad of the modern era, and the first to be held in China, was always going to be sprinkled with diplomatic tensions. Most were quickly diffused, and many were highly enjoyable. If, during the United States basketball team’s casual flattening of their Chinese opponents on Sunday night, you could bear to glance away from LeBron James and up to the stands, there was an exquisite awkwardness to be seen in the gestures of Yang Jiechi, the Chinese minister of foreign affairs, who was seated next to President Bush. As a matter of etiquette, how excitedly, if at all, should you applaud when your home team scores, given that your honored guest is of the enemy camp? Will the pride of that guest receive a dent? Even when Yao Ming, whose status in China is roughly equivalent to that of Simba at the end of The Lion King, opened the scoring in less than a minute, and the whole place went nuts, Yang contented himself with a few soft palm pats, just above his knees, and soon after that went into a permanent freeze of geniality.

  To be fair, he had had a difficult weekend. On Saturday the ninth, the first full day of the Games, word came through of a stabbing. It turned out that Todd Bachman, the father-in-law of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach, had been killed, and his wife, Barbara, severely injured, by a Chinese man. Later, an American couple, one of them an employee at the U.S. Embassy, told me how dismayed they were by the way the story spread, in particular by the rolling headline on a news website: “American killed at Olympics.” “No, he wasn’t,” the wife said, and she was right: The couple wore nothing to identify them as Americans, and they were attacked at the Drum Tower, two miles south of the Olympic Green. Still, back home, the connection had been made: China was a danger zone. Among visitors to Beijing, there was a touch of sympathy for the Chinese, who were reminded the hard way, and at the worst time, that you can build a wall against organized threats from without but cannot legislate for the lone wretch with a knife who lurks within. Wang Wei, the executive vice president and secretary general of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games, said in response, “We are living in a world where surprises do happen.” True enough, although his next phrase seemed to hail from a different world: “We reassure you that nothing like this is going to happen again.” It is the imprint of certainty—the implication that fate itself can be bent back into position—that rings oddly in more jaded ears. The American swimmer Larsen Jensen was asked, after taking a bronze in the four-hundred-meter freestyle, if he had been nervous before the race. He said not: “That’s what my father taught me. Only worry about the things you can control.” The horse sense of Mr. Jensen, Sr., would not pass muster with the authorities in Beijing, where they try to control things until the worry goes away.

  That is why the murder was a shock to the Olympic system. We know, in the end, that a sense of security is always false, yet the Beijing authorities had strained every sinew to tell us otherwise—to convince us, and themselves, that we had landed in a safe place. On the principle that every Western visitor is a sucker, to be wooed into believing that the grass is greener inside the fence, they made sure that security measures were not hammered home like rivets but tricked out with homely detail. To leave your hotel in the morning and have your bag and your person searched before you board a bus to the Olympic Green, as if it were a plane, is no hardship; indeed, from a professional point of view, to be felt up and patted down with such eager regularity has given me the first, helpful hint as to what life was like for Jean Harlow. And who would be left unmoved by the fake red velvet, edged in gold, that bedecks the plastic tray on which you are invited to lay your wallet? It was the same at Beijing Airport: The first thing I saw on arrival was a sniffer dog, but instead of some lunging German shepherd, with streaks of Baskerville-style foam along its jaws, there was a beagle. Now, beagles have been sniffing around U.S. airports for years, but this one was chasing a rubber ball. Running behind, at the end of its tether, was the dog’s keeper, laughing gaily, and behind him, somewhere in the seven years since Beijing won the Olympic bid, was a committee dedicated solely to canine propaganda. As long as one mutt fancier from the tenderhearted West caught sight of the romping beagle and exclaimed to her husband, “Oh, look at little Snu Pi! See, they don’t eat them, they play with them!” the committee’s job was done.

  The apotheosis of this effort was the opening ceremony at the National Stadium, on the evening of August 8. I arrived well in time for the crash course in audience participation. “The world has given its love and trust to China, and today China will give the world a big warm hug,” one of the masters of ceremonies said. While admiring their faultless English, you had to wonder why they had chosen to learn it by watching Barney’s Great Adventure. How, in less than twenty years, does a place go from mowing down student dissent with tanks to offering unconditional hugs? Was this a front, or had the government realized that the patois of mushy togetherness is now a lingua franca, not least in commercials, and thus well worth acquiring? On every seat was a sack of goodies, and we were duly taught to rattle our drums, wave our Chinese flags, shake our funky light sticks, and finally, at the avian highlight of the ceremony, “imitate the movement of the doves with your hands.” Aside from the risk of developing repetitive wing injury, this was all too peaceful for me, and I felt a sudden, heretical yearning for the Paris Olympics of 1900, when the shooting competition used live pigeons. Twenty-one of them were blasted out of the skies by the gold medalist alone, and were presumably last seen heading for the kitchens of the Tour d’Argent. I prayed for som
ething similar on the archery field, when a photographer strayed too close to the targets during the qualifying rounds, but a voice barked from the public-address system—“Please stand down”—and the chance was lost.

  In the National Stadium, as the sky darkened and eight o’clock approached, a multitude of figures scuttled forward, each wheeling what appeared to be an outsized laundry basket. For a second, I feared a monstrous pantomime: Would a clown burst forth from every basket, tripping over a pile of sheets? I need not have fretted. They weren’t baskets; they were illuminated drums. Cometh the hour, cometh the glowing red drumsticks, the heaving sea of blocks, the Brobdingnagian scroll unspooling before our eyes, and other miracles of visual manipulation. In the course of a long evening, billions of viewers were induced not so much to revise their opinion of China as to realize that its formidable manpower could be harnessed to the cause of astonishment. China supports a population of 1.3 billion, and the knowledge of that resource was never far away; indeed, the whole evening became an exercise in number crunching, as mass art was constructed from a mass of humanity. One townful of men and women would race on, swarm into a shape, and race off, to be replaced by the next; if, deep below the spectacle, there was an unspoken suggestion that it would be an extremely bad idea to go to war against this nation, it never rose to the surface, although one aerial traveling shot of fireworks exploding in sequence along the street leading up to the stadium, displayed for us on screens inside, was a ringer for bombing-run footage from the Vietnam War.