A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.
-from “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
I’m not a huge sports fan anymore, but my God, I owe them my life. Growing up, I was not a “natural athlete,” although I had my moments of what I call “accidental athleticism”: smacking fastballs over centerfielders, completing game-winning saves in soccer–plays that made observing parents go, “Huh?” On the whole, however, I was timid, out of shape, non-compettive, and too-sensitive. My idea of fulfillment was writing quirky stories about talking sharks and shooting ten minute movies with my friends out of my parents’ garage, but in some cavern of my heart, I was always drawn to sports. I loved the spectacle of athletics–the dazzling drama of a close game, the towering talent of our professional athletes. Looking back, I now know that I was feeling that unspoken magic of sports, which is that they manage to assimilate some of the most intruiging aspects of the human experience–competition, violence, heartbreak, and rivalry–into compact doses of entertainment.
Just like stories.
See, I don’t have the typical origin story that writers seem to have. I wasn’t an avid reader as a kid. I didn’t read Hemingway and feel a beam of light cast upon me from the literary heavens, followed by the husky voice of Papa himself telling me: “GO WRITE, SON.” As a kid, I hated books. I watched sports–the New England teams, though the Red Sox were my favorite. And sports games, I’ve learned, were my books: deeply dramatic, brimming with passion, suspense, and heartache. As in literature, each loss comes with a painful lesson, each victory with a celebration of virtue.
For me, baseball is the most literary of sports. Each season is a mammoth novel. The Boston Red Sox history: a supernatural saga.
My love of Red Sox baseball, of course, was no accident. It was passed down to me and my brother by my father and mother through stories. My mother used to tell us about former Red Sox players like Carlton “Pudge” Fisk, who waved his famous homerun into a fair ball. My father, a genuine sports fan, used to take me and my brother to get ice cream and we’d listen to Sox games on the radio. I remember refusing to take a single bite of ice cream until Pedro Martinez threw his first pitch. Once he hurled that opening fastball, however, I was lost, lulled into reverie as a reader in the first scene of a introductory line of a classic work. As a Jane Austen fanatic is drawn by Austen’s idelible, sarcastic voice, I was dazzled by the snappy language of sportscasters, how they spoke with poetic quickness, painting each rapid play with only language. And I would recycle the storytelling magic of sportscasters into my own stories. As kids, my brother and I would pitch to each other, play pass with kids in the neighborhood, and before we’d fall asleep, we’d narrate our own make-believe baseball season.
Then, my father took us to Fenway Park.
I was nine, ten years old. I’ll never forget that day. As my brother and I emerged into the stadium, we halted in awe. The Green Monster! Pesky Pole! The men who were heroes on my TV stood before our naked eyes! It was like setting foot in a dreamworld come to life, to actually smell the yeasty scent of overpriced beer, hear the guttural growl of digruntled fans, and feel the intimacy of being on the same wavelength as a stadium of sloppy fans. It was all so there.
“Everybody remembers that moment,” my father said, “when they finally see Fenway in person.”
Since that first game, I’ve been to more Red Sox games than I can count and I remember each game in stories: how I watched Carl Everett assault an umpire. How I watched Trot Nixon play for the Indians in Cleveland and receive a heartfelt welcome from his Boston fans. How my Uncle and I stayed too late at Fenway Park and missed the last train back to Maine. How, in a pub (that I was too young to be in), I watched Pedro Martinez heave Don Zimmer’s head into the ground.
My family and I stuck with the Sox through their curse. We followed them on the road. I’m reminded of that pivotal moment in Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s classic baseball poem “Casey at that Bat”, in which the speaker notes,
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
We were them. The ones who clung to hope.
Hope, I’ve since learned, is a fire stoked by stories. As a Red Sox fan, I remember how one season could be a suffering tale of heartache, but we Sox fans clung to the hope that another Pudge would wave his way to a homerun. We told ourselves stories to move on. We clung to the hope of a new slate, a love story between superstitious, bearded, whisky-guzzling cowboys. Now, as an aspiring writer in my twenties, I’m not the same die-hard sports fan, but I would know nothing of storytelling if not for baseball. And even today, from time to time, I’ll lace up my sneakers for a run and imagine that I’m rounding the diamond at Fenway. I’ll feel as excited as the kid I once was, eating ice cream by the radio. Or the kid seeing Fenway for the first time. I’ll run and feel my heart swell with childlike wonder and hope: that place in which stories are born.
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Photo: Getty Images