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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Perhaps my father had read somewhere—in The Saturday Evening Post, it could have been, or the old Boston Herald—an article that claimed that college interviewers wanted more than anything else to talk about sports. More likely, he was speaking out of his own sports mania, which was genuine and intense. He would watch sports on television for hours on end, any sports at all—baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, of course, but also boxing, candlepin bowling, even (if there were nothing else) tag-team wrestling. Often while he watched these contests, he would listen to another game on the radio, pressed to his ear. On Yom Kippur, which frequently happened to fall during the World Series, we were not allowed in our house to turn on lights, switch on or off appliances, or do anything else that constituted “work,” according to the rabbinical interpretation my synagogue followed, so my father would leave the television on at sundown, before the beginning of the holiday, in order to be able to look at the game on the following afternoon, when we walked home for a few hours between the Musaf and Ne’ila services. This sports obsession had, as I’ve said, no roots in any personal skills of my father’s, but it did have deep roots in his identity. It was, as I early on understood, bound up with a kind of cultural insecurity. On the one hand, though he was born in Boston, he defined his entire existence through the lenses of his Jewishness, secretly distrusted most Christians, and adored speaking Yiddish as the language of privacy, intimacy, and fun, and, on the other hand, he was eager to be thought, as he constantly put it, “100 percent American.” Being a sports fan—not only a public, vocal role but also a genuine passion in the privacy of his home, when his guard was down—was for my father a way to feel truly American, as if some mocking voice were always calling his Americanness in doubt. And not only truly American but also truly a man: that is, I presume, why none of the women in my extended family took more than a polite interest in those games that occupied so many hours of my father’s time and that of my uncles and others in his circle. They were all only one generation removed from the shtetl and from those men with the long curled earlocks and kaftans who represented in the conspicuously narrow view of mid-twentieth century America the opposite of everything manly. But I—I who would never have uttered the sentence “I am 100 percent American,” because it would not have occurred to me that I wasn’t; I who had been strongly dissuaded by my parents from learning Yiddish; I who was baffled by my parents’ preoccupation with who on television or in the movies was Jewish and who wasn’t—had no comparable identity-stake in being a sports fanatic. And though I certainly worried about my masculinity—I can still recall my intense junior-high-school embarrassment when I was teased for holding my books “like a girl”—it did not, for some reason, occur to me that the solution lay in watching the games on television. Or rather, I doubted that memorizing the batting average of every Red Sox player for the last hundred years would compensate for the fact that I had difficulty hitting the ball out of the infield. Still, I was in fact a baseball fan, an enthusiasm no doubt inherited from my father, confirmed by my friends, and cemented in the summer of 1957, when I was fourteen, by a piece of great good fortune: someone offered my father a season ticket to Fenway Park, or at least for the mid-week day games there. I was home that summer, I wasn’t working, and I was old enough to take the MTA to the park by myself, without my mother, who had a nervous disposition, being thereby driven to call the police. This was a time in which a preponderance of games was still played in the afternoon and in which Fenway Park had plenty of unsold seats—something that hasn’t happened for years—so that several days a week I could quietly slip down from my perch in the grandstand to a box seat near the field, close enough to hear the umpire shouting “strike” or the first-base coach’s hoarse voice when he urged the runner to take second base or to hold up. The 1957 Red Sox were not a great team—they finished third in the American League, 16 games behind the first-place Yankees—but they had a 16-game winner in Tom Brewer, a fine new third baseman in Frank Malzone, a strong right fielder in Jackie Jensen (a golden athlete hobbled as a professional baseball player by a crippling fear of flying), and a capable, though mentally ill, center fielder in Jimmy Piersall. But most of all they had my hero Ted Williams. Though he was nearing the end of his astonishing career—he turned 39 that summer—and was thickening around the waist, Williams was and remains the greatest athlete I have ever seen. Most games are built around some condition of great difficulty, often enhanced by the rules—the prohibition against using your arms and the off-side rules make it almost impossible to score a goal in soccer; the fierce charge of menacing 300-pound linebackers makes it almost impossible to concentrate enough to throw a football with pinpoint accuracy; the fundamental structure of the heart and lungs makes it almost impossible to pedal a bicycle at high speed over the Alpe d’Huez. In baseball, the difficulty is simply hitting a small, hard ball hurled toward you, often with a wicked spin, at speeds close to 100 miles an hour. To decide, between the moment the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand and the moment it arrives over the plate, when to swing and when to hold off, and then, if you decide to go for it, to time the swing perfectly is, again, almost impossible. A major-league player who can hit a ball successfully one in four times, or a bit more, is handsomely and deservedly well-paid; a player who can steadily do it one in three times is a star. In 1957 Williams’s batting average was .388; his slugging percentage (a measure of his power, calculated by dividing his total number of bases by his at bats) was .731, and his on-base percentage was .528. To a baseball fan, these statistics, along with his 38 home runs that season (including homers in four consecutive at bats) and a streak of reaching base 16 straight times, are phenomenal. I was completely under the spell of the magic. Sitting near the on-deck circle, in my purloined place, I would repeatedly shout his name, “Hi Ted,” hoping that he would look around and catch my adoring eye, but he never did. His concentration was lethal, his timing uncanny, his physical grace breathtaking. He would stand at the plate, not hunched over as hitters sometimes are, but straight and poised; and then the perfect swing would uncoil, and the ball would rocket off his bat. He was like a god. This image of Ted Williams was the only thing that came to me, when I sat with the Harvard interviewer, trying my best to hijack every question and take it back to sports. No matter what I was asked, I contrived somehow—often with a subtlety and indirectness worthy of the narrator’s elderly aunts in Remembrance of Things Past—to conjure up the athletic genius of the Red Sox’s number 9. No doubt the interviewer was increasingly perplexed and annoyed. And here, of course, is where Sepp Gumbrecht could have saved me. For I was not only following my father’s injunction and I was not simply displaying my sports ardor to hide the fact that I was a hopeless egghead: I was in fact trying to describe what was, to that point in my life, my most intense aesthetic experience. But I did not have the language for it; indeed, I did not know that I had had an aesthetic experience. If only I had had the German word for composure, Gelassenheit, I could have conveyed about Ted Williams what Gumbrecht calls the athlete’s “peculiar quietness,” his “capacity of letting be.” If only I had had Gumbrecht’s account of a beautiful play as “an epiphany of form,” “the sudden, surprising convergence of several athletes’ bodies in time and space”; if only I had had his observation that “at decisive moments in a competition, the flux of time seems to be suspended”; if only I had had his description of the way that rapt fans “immerse themselves in the realm of presence”; if I only had had at my command the words of the Olympic gold medalist Pablo Morales that Gumbrecht richly analyzes—“lost in focused intensity”—I could perhaps have persuaded the impatient, skeptical interviewer that I was not merely wasting his time. When I was put on the waiting list at Harvard, I said to myself that it was the interview that did me in. After all, students with much weaker records than mine were accepted. Years later—when I had already begun to teach at Harvard—I told the story to a friend who worked in the admissions office. He laughed and urged me to read the spate of books that have recently appeared documenting the anti-Semitic admissions policies that were in place at the time I applied. Did I by chance, he asked me, remember the last names of the students who were admitted? I got the point. Still, Yale, where I went (happily, as it turned out) to college, was certainly at that era as anti-Semitic as Harvard, if not more so; the difference was that I did not have to go to New Haven for an interview and therefore did not try to convey to anyone my aesthetic admiration for Ted Williams. I will not belabor this essay, which is very slight, but I will quickly note several small rhetorical features. 1. If the piece is to work at all, and of course I am not sure that it does, I need to separate the language of Gumbrecht’s analysis from the personal anecdote. The analysis has to enter—like a deus ex machina—to provide (but only too late) the conceptual framework that I sorely lacked back in my interview. 2. This means that I need to keep my own anecdote simple, humorous, and above all localized and concrete, in order to highlight the contrast with the largely abstract, theoretical terms that Gumbrecht employs. I use various devices to situate my own account and to give it the air of authenticity: the names of the largely forgotten baseball players; the riff of statistics; the flourish of Yiddish; the Hebrew words for the afternoon and evening Yom Kippur services, and so forth. 3. I need, however, to be sure that Gumbrecht’s theoretical terms seem reasonably transparent and effective—otherwise, the piece would become a satire on the very person I am trying to honor. I have had, therefore, to choose carefully and to break up some rather heavy Germanic sentences in order to elicit their nuggets of clarity. 4. Finally, while representing my own adolescent naiveté, I have to suggest lightly that I am now one of the initiated; that is, I want to contrast the past with the present. But I do not want to sound self-satisfied. That’s the purpose of the sentence in which I comically invoke the elderly aunts in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past: the allusion is (or hopes to be) at once sophisticated and self-mocking. Moreover, Proust serves as the very epitome of the aestheticism that I want through my personal anecdote at once to affirm and to analyze as a social strategy. I do not by any means hijack everything that I write into the service of personal memoir. In fact, I used to begin many of my essays with an historical fact, often attached to a date:
The advantage of these beginnings—which became a bit too familiar in my writing, so I had to stop—is precisely that they take you away from the self, the self of the writer as well as the reader. You do not have to write the dreary sentences that say “In this essay I intended to explore the theme of transvestism in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. My goal will be…blah, blah, blah.” Instead you plunge the reader into a story that has already begun, and you create—or at least try to create—the desire to know more. Did Thomas More persuade the heretic to abjure? Why did Marlowe call Moses a “juggler”? Exorcisms in Buckinghamshire? And what exactly was the story that Montaigne was told? (It was the story of Martin Guerre.) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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