by John Updike
But you never really say goodbye; popular music is always there, flavoring our American lives, keeping our mortal beat, a murmuring subconscious sneaking up out of the car radio with some abrupt sliding phrase that hooks us into jubilation, into aspiration. I like it when, say, Madonna’s “True Blue” comes on: catchy. Long ago, driving to school with my father on cold winter mornings, I would lean into the feeble glow of the radio dial as if into warmth: this was me, this yearniness canned in New York and beamed from Philadelphia, beamed through the air to guide me, somehow, toward a wonderful life.
The Boston Red Sox, as of 1986
FORTY YEARS AGO and four hundred miles from Boston, I sat in my father’s Chevrolet, in the Shillington (Pennsylvania) High School parking lot, and listened to the seventh game of the 1946 World Series, the Red Sox versus the Cardinals. Eighth inning, score 3–3, Cardinals up, Enos Slaughter on first base, Harry Walker at the plate; there’s a hit to center field, Culberson (substituting for the injured Dom DiMaggio) throws to the infield, shortstop Johnny Pesky cuts it off—Slaughter is being waved around third! Pesky hesitates, the throw is late, Slaughter scores!! The Cardinals hold on to win the game and the World Series. I don’t know if I cried, sitting alone in that venerable Chevrolet, but I was only fourteen and well might have. Dazed and with something lost forever, I emerged into the golden September afternoon, where my classmates were nuzzling their steadies, sneaking smokes, and shooting baskets in a blissful animal innocence I could no longer share.
What had led me, who had never been north of Greenwich, Connecticut, and didn’t know Beacon Hill from Bunker Hill or Fenway Park from Park Street Under, to attach my heart to that distant aggregation? Ted Williams had made a dent in my consciousness before the war, but it was the ’46 Sox that made me a passionate fan. What a team that was!—Ted in left, Dom in center, Doerr at second, Pesky at short, big Rudy York having a great twilight season at first, Boo Ferriss and Tex Hughson on the mound. Though the Cardinals squeaked by them in that series, the Sox looked sure to cruise to pennants at least until I got out of high school in 1950. But in fact they didn’t, coming perilously close in ’48 and ’49 but not quite having it in the clutch. The postwar pattern of thrills and spills was set, and whenever they came to Philadelphia, there I was, hanging by the radio.
With its nine defensive men widely spaced on the field, baseball is an easier game to visualize than a fast shuffle like basketball and hockey, and until girls and a driver’s license got me by the throat I spent many an idyllic summer day indoors huddled on the easy chair next to the hoarse little family Philco. The announcers’ voices in their granular shades of excitement, and the wraparound crowd noise, and the sound in the middle distance of the ball being hit, not to mention the uproarious clatter when a foul ball sailed into the broadcast booth, made a vivid picture in ways superior to what I would see when, once or twice a summer, I was bused the fifty miles to Shibe Park’s bleachers. I even kept box scores of my audited games, and listened on the rainout days when the play-by-play of some remote and feeble contest like the Browns against the Senators would be verbalized from a teletype whose chattering could be heard in the lulls. The two Philadelphia teams were pretty feeble themselves, and created the vacuum into which my irrational ardor for the Red Sox nicely filled.
My barber was a Yankee fan; that was the other choice in Pennsylvania. As his scissors gnashed around my ears and his hair tonic ate into my scalp he would patiently again explain why Joe DiMaggio was a team player, and why as a team the Yankees would always win. But they didn’t like Roosevelt or Truman at the barbershop, either, and I would rather lose with Boston than win with New York. When my college choices came down to Cornell or Harvard, the decision was obvious. And yet, those four years in Cambridge, it seems to have dawned on me rather rarely that the Red Sox were only two ten-minute subway rides (or, on a sunny day, a nice walk along the river) away. Living in New York, though, I would brave the West Side IRT up to the Bronx and from within the cavernous shadows of the Stadium admire the aging Williams as he matched strokes with Mickey Mantle, who had replaced DiMaggio as the hood ornament of the onrolling Yankees. The Fifties Red Sox didn’t leave much of a mark on the record book, but they seem to have inspired an unflagging loyalty in me. While it is not entirely true that I moved from New York to New England to be closer to the Red Sox, it is not entirely false either. I wanted to keep Ted Williams company while I could.
Lying in backyards or on the beach, driving in the car or squinting into a book, I listened to the games, and internalized Curt Gowdy. That ever so soothing and sensible voice, with its guileless hint of Wyoming twang, relayed pop-ups and bloop hits, blowouts and shutouts; passing heroes like Clyde Vollmer and Ellis Kinder and Walt Dropo and Sammy White flitted across the airwaves, and Jackie Jensen and Jimmy Piersall glimmered in Williams’s lengthening shadow. My wife’s parents had a retreat on a far hill of Vermont, without electricity or telephone but with plenty of pine cones and bear turds in the woods. We parked our car on the edge of that woods, and there I would go, many an afternoon, to sit in the front seat and tune in the Red Sox. Curt’s voice came in strong from (I think) Burlington—so strong that one day the car battery wouldn’t turn the starter over, and we were stranded. I must have been the only man in New England who, rather than lose touch with the Red Sox, marooned his near and dear in a forest full of bears.
The older you get, the stranger your earlier selves seem, until you can scarcely remember having made their acquaintance at all. Whatever held me there, rapt by the radio, all those precious hours? Ted, of course, who was always doing something fascinating—getting injured, going off to Korea, vilifying the press, announcing his retirement, hitting .388, hitting Joe Cronin’s housekeeper with a tossed bat, spitting at the stands, going fishing when he shouldn’t, etc. But the Red Sox around him had a fascination, too; generous-spending Yawkey saw to it that there were always some other classy performers, and some hopeful passages in every season. Yet the wheels inevitably came off the cart, or were lubricated too late in the summer, and the Red Sox—like Mercutio, Scott Fitzgerald, and Adlai Stevenson—had that ultimate charm, the charm of losers.
All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed. Chris Evert, for example, did not win our hearts until Navratilova began to push her around, and I know a man who, to his own evident satisfaction, has been a Chicago Cubs fan for fifty years. Are the killer Mets of today nearly as much fun as those hapless teams of post-expansion days, the “Amazing Mets” that New Yorkers, bored by the Yankees, clasped to their sardonic hearts? As a boy in Pennsylvania I felt sorry for Mr. Yawkey, that all his financial goodness couldn’t buy a World Series. I felt sorry for Williams, that he didn’t go five-for-five every day and that spiteful sportswriters kept cheating him of the MVP award. The Red Sox in my immature mind were like the man in the Hollywood movie who, because he’s wearing a tuxedo, is bound to slip on a banana peel. They were gallantry and grace without the crassness of victory. I loved them. I might have loved some other team just as well—an infant gosling, if caught at the right moment, will fall in love with a zoologist instead of its mother, and a German, if kicked often enough, will fall in love with a shoe—but the Red Sox were the team I had chosen, and one’s choices, once made, generate a self-justifying and self-sustaining inertia. All over the country, millions of fans root and holler for one team against another for no reason except that they have chosen to. Fanship is an acte gratuit, hurled into the face of an indifferent (or at least a preoccupied) universe.
Since Williams retired—dramatically, as usual—in 1960, my Red Sox ardor, with its abuse of car batteries, has cooled. But I have not been unaware, in the quarter-century since, of the pennants of 1967 and ’75, and, just as in 1946, the subsequent seventh-game disappointments in the World Series. I remember, in fact, on a late-September Sunday of 1967, crouching with some other suburban men, in an interruption of a touch-football game, around a l
ittle radio on the grass as it told us that the Twins were losing to the Red Sox while the White Sox were beating the Tigers, thus allowing our Yastrzemski-led boys to back into their first pennant in twenty-one years. And I remember, as well, at the end of another season, in 1978, when my wife and I, heading for a Cambridge dinner party, parked along Memorial Drive and listened to the last inning of the Yankees–Red Sox playoff. We heard about the pokey Bucky Dent home run, and we heard in living audio the foul Yastrzemski pop-up. It was Slaughter rounding third all over again.
The memoirs of a Red Sox fan tend to sound sour, a litany of disappointments and mistakes going back to the day when Babe Ruth was traded. But the other side of this tails-up coin is that time and again the team, as its generations of personnel yield one to another, has worked its way to the edge of total victory. Yaz’s famous pop-up, for instance, was preceded by a heroic week of solid victories, forcing the Yankees to a playoff, and in the game itself we (notice the reflexive-possessive pronoun) had fought back from a 5–2 deficit to 5–4 with the tying run on third. In sports, not only do you win some and lose some but twenty-five competitors, in a twenty-six-team sport, are going to come in lower than first. What makes Boston—little old Boston up here among the rocky fields and empty mills—think it deserves championship teams all the time? Having the Celtics may be miracle enough, not to mention a Patriots team that finally won in Miami. The founding Puritans left behind a lingering conviction that divine election is reflected in earthly success, and that this so-called city built upon a hill has hosies on a prime share. The scorn heaped in the Boston columns upon imperfect Red Sox teams is nothing if not self-righteous.
Now this summer’s team, casually relegated by most April prophets to a fourth- or fifth-place finish, has made it to the playoffs. It seems a strange team to us veteran Red Sox watchers—solid, sometimes great pitching, and fitful, even anemic hitting. Where are the home runs of yesteryear? Wade Boggs singled his way to some batting championships, and now Jim Rice has choked up on the handle and is hitting for average, too. Only Baylor and Armas seem to be swinging from the heels any more. Heroism has moved from the plate to the pitchers’ mound: Clemens so full of the Right Stuff his uniform fairly pops its buttons, and Hurst and Seaver looking just as resolute. Oil Can Boyd emerged from his month in the doghouse with an enhanced charisma; the one thing made clear in that murky episode* was how much we need him, his arm and his twitchy self-exhortations and his terrific name. And Sambito and Schiraldi staggered out of nowhere to help the much-abused Stanley nail the slippery games down. This nervous-making crew, with its gimpy veterans and erratic infield, has shown toughness and courage and internal rapport, and like last year’s Patriots did better than anyone dared hope. These Sox were spared the burden of great expectations carried by so many of their starcrossed predecessors; now they have nothing to lose but the marbles. Once again, I’m tuned in.
Postscript: Well, the team was overwhelmed in the end by historical precedent. In the fifth game of the league playoffs against the California Angels, it came back to win after being one strike away from defeat, 5–4, and elimination, four games to two. After this miracle, it easily beat the Angels twice more, and began the World Series by taking two from the New York Mets in Shea Stadium. Then the spell wore off, to be replaced by the hoary jinx. Two losses to the Mets at Fenway evened the series; Hurst, the winner of the first game, a shutout, valiantly won the fifth game, and back in Queens the Red Sox seemed to have the sixth game and the World Series sewed up. They went into the bottom of the tenth leading 5–3, and Schiraldi, having replaced Clemens in the eighth, retired two batters and got two strikes on Gary Carter. Then ensued, amid the tumult of a stadium of fans called back from the dead, a nightmare to cap all Sox fans’ nightmares: three successive singles, a wild pitch (by Stanley), and an error (by Bill Buckner, the hobbling first baseman) that let in the third and winning run of the inning. All over New England, people stared incredulous at their television sets. Three times in that inning the Red Sox were within one strike of winning the World Series for the first time since 1918. After such an epic collapse (or miraculous comeback, from the Mets’ point of view) not even Hurst could win the next game, though he took a 3–0 lead into the sixth inning. For the fourth time in forty years, the Red Sox lost the World Series in the seventh game.
Ted Williams, as of 1986
HE APPEARS in television commercials now, but seems sheepish saying the lines, a leathery-faced old gent whose eyes look a bit menacing even as they strive to twinkle. For a long time, as Joe DiMaggio urbanely peddled coffee machines on the little round-cornered screen, Ted Williams was conspicuous for his absence from the public eye, save when he peeped out of the dugout while managing the overlookable Senators/Rangers of 1969–72. The last time he appeared in an old-timers game at Fenway Park, he made a valiant shoestring catch but could hardly get his bat on the ball, though he was given an extra, out-of-turn “ups.” His recent interviews are eerily good-natured, as he blesses the newest version of the Red Sox or the newest unsuccessful attempt—by Rod Carew, George Brett, Wade Boggs—to supplant him as the last .400 hitter.
It is now forty-five years since the cocky, lanky kid from San Diego closed out the season with an average of .406. That statistic has emerged from the shadows of 1941 (when Jolting Joe hit in fifty-six straight games and the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor) to become Williams’s most famous feat, the tarnish-proof polish on the silver of his reputation; but it really is the fifteen postwar years of his career, harassed though they were by injuries, sportswriters, boos, disappointments on the field and marital misadventures off it, the Korean War, and the Williams Shift, that established him as a steady wonder, the best hitter of his era and a kind of link between the highly technological players of today and the rough-hewn statistical giants (Cobb and Hornsby, Sisler and Ruth, Napoleon Lajoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson) of a virtually mythological time whose living witnesses are increasingly few.
By 1986 more than a generation of baseball fans and players has grown up who never saw Williams play—never saw him hit, one should say, for though he was a dutiful outfielder with a strong arm when young, and a baserunner who went through the motions and stole as much as four bases a season, he always looked as if his heart was at the plate, which it was. Hitting was his thing, and even when the Red Sox, in the late Forties, had stars at almost every position, the crowd waited through the line-up to see Ted’s turn at bat. A tall man with broad shoulders, he towered over the plate, and seemed greedy while there, wringing the bat handle with his fists, switchily moving it back and forth as if showing the pitcher exactly where he wanted the poor ball placed. He had a wide stance with nothing contorted about it, no peek-a-boo around his shoulder like Stan Musial, no funny work with the feet like so many of today’s overcoached fusspots.
In Williams’s day baseball still savored of its cow-pasture beginnings—the East still held a few actual cow pastures—and the uniform was baggy, and no hitter wore a golf glove, let alone two, and the batting helmet was viewed (at least by Williams) as an encumbering innovation. His swing was long, much longer than Ruth’s (how did Ruth hit all those home runs out of that chop?), and beautiful the way Sam Snead’s swing is beautiful, all body parts working together and the ball just an incident in the course of the arc. Pop the hips was his theory, just like a golf pro’s; but the golf ball isn’t coming at you at ninety miles an hour with English on it, out of a mess of billboards. He says he swung slightly upwards, to compensate for the pitcher being raised above the batter; but it didn’t look like that. His swing looked level. The first Williams homer I remember, seen from the bleachers of old Shibe Park in Philadelphia, was a line drive that was still rising as it cleared the right-field fence. There was something very pure and uncontrived about the way he hit, and though his power totals and his averages are not the best, nobody ranks so high in both departments of hitting. To put it another way, nobody else with over five hundred homers (521) has so high a lifetime avera
ge (.344). He was the strongest good hitter, or the finest-tuned slugger, the game has seen. Temperamental and injury-prone, he yet showed an impressive durability; he won his fifth batting championship in 1957 by hitting .388, and won his sixth the next year at the age of forty.
He came from California to a dowdy New England metropolis with too many newspapers, and was instant news. The Williams excitement had to do with his personality as well as his prowess; the former was as complex as the latter seemed transparent. He was, like Ty Cobb, a deprived man, hungry for greatness; but, unlike Cobb, he had a sweet smile. The smile can be seen on the old pre-war photos, and in televised interviews now, as the philosophical fisherman from Islamorada fields an especially cute question. Boston wanted to love the Kid, but he was prickly in its embrace. He was hot-tempered and rabbit-eared and became contemptuous of sportswriters and too proud to tip his hat after hitting a home run. And the teams he ornamented didn’t win all the marbles; the spectacular Sox of 1946 lost the World Series, and after that pennants just slipped away, while Williams sulked, spat, threw bats, and threatened retirement. In the end, the city loved him all the more because the relationship had proved so complex; “some obstacle,” as Freud wrote, “is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height.” No sports figure—not Bobby Orr or Larry Bird or Rocky Marciano—had a greater hold over the fans of New England than Ted Williams. From the generous team owner Tom Yawkey he received top dollar—what now seems a paltry $125,000 a season—but he was one of the few ballplayers who all by themselves brought people out to the park. In 1957 the third-place Red Sox drew 1,187,087, and the sportswriter Harold Kaese wrote, “The Red Sox drew 187,087 and Ted Williams drew the other million.”