A Thing Done Well: A Literary Fan Bids Updike Adieu

When I was 13 years old my godmother/violin teacher bought me a book for my birthday; "The Greatest American Sportswriting of the Twentieth Century." She knew that I loved sports, particularly baseball, so I guess she must have thought that I would love reading about them just as much as I liked playing them. (Sports was always a contentious subject with my godmother, sports were manly and the violin, particularly when you're a pre-teen, seems kind of wimpy. She knew I'd eventually be pulled in that direction.)

I can't say that I wasn't a little disappointed. I mean, I was grateful that she had gotten me something for my birthday. But I was 13 years old, barely out of my Matthew Christopher phase. And although it makes me happy to know that my godmother thought I was intelligent enough to truly appreciate the artistic merit of America's best sportswriters, you don't instantly jump from "The Kid Who Only Hit Homers," to Dick Schaaps musings about his time in a hotel room with Tom Seaver and Muhammad Ali or feature length pieces in Esquire magazine about the legendary Dick Butkus. Not to say that "The Greatest American Sportswriting of the Twentieth Century," didn't eventually find it's rightful place in my life. It functioned wonderfully as a book I could use to bear down on when I did my homework on the floor of my room, or as a surprisingly heavy doorstop. Overtime, it got wrinkled and started to fall apart at the seams. Not from being read too much, but from being misused and neglected by a careless 13 year old who didn't have much use for what was inside.

But there's a very long distance between 13 and 14. It's partially because of the set-up of American schools.(to put it in perspective, when you're 13 you go to school with people who might still be playing with action figures. When you're 14 and went to a high school like I did, you're going to school with some people who are 20 and have families.) Between that, my propensity to pretend that I'm older than I am, and other more personal circumstances, I probably did enough growing up to actually take a second look at my godmother's gift. A lot of the book I still didn't get, and the topics, which ranged from baseball to NASCAR and horseracing, held my interest to varying degrees. But to even my young untrained mind, the writing was gorgeous. I laughed at the picture of Ted Williams as the Florida Keys curmudgeon painted so brilliantly by Richard Cramer in "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?"- the image of a lonely Joe DiMaggio sitting by the Bay, carrying so much weight in his heart haunted me. But my favorite piece took me on a little jaunt to Fenway Park, before it became baseball's yuppie Mecca, on a sunny September day, to watch the last game of a legend, Boston's bitter institution, Ted Williams. I don't know what it is about Ted Williams, maybe it's the contemptuous personality combined with the rugged Greatest Generation charm, but he brought out the best in the sportswriters who covered him. He wasn't immune from the venomous sportswriter cliches of the day of course, (ones that plague players like Alex Rodriguez to this day) and Updike manages to cast them aside as the intellectually shallow arguments that they are. All while turning a beautiful phrase about two college students sitting on the third base side of the diamond- just as effortlessly as a veteran middle infield turns a 6-4-3 double play. Yes, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" might be pound for pound the best writing in the non-fiction sports genre.

The entire essay is dazzlingly understated, he comes as close as possible to recreating the feeling of a lazy, meaningless September game, interspersed with sharpest insights and the small fact that it's the last game of the "greatest hitter who ever lived." What I loved about Updike was his astonishing vocabulary that somehow never seemed out of place or presumptuous. It's like he knew that under normal circumstances (i.e. when you weren't reading something written by him) the reader would be hard pressed to figure out just what he meant- in the hands of a less gifted author bestowing the term of "dowagers" on grizzled old sportswriters would have seemed excessive. While reading Updike though, it felt just right.

There are several famous passages in his eassy, most of them have been quoted endlessly by understandably grateful sportswriters. There's his dismissal of the writers who tried to dismiss Williams achievements because of a handful of games at the end of the season, putting the idea into words better than us sabermetric folks put into numbers. "The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness."

And then there's perhaps the most famous passage- after Williams hits his climactic home run in what turns out to be the final at-bat of his career.

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.

It's the fatalism in the last sentence that really gets me "Gods do not answer letters." It's certainly sad but not excessively so; it's tempered by a sentence a little bit before, about immortality not being transferable. I guess it's kind of unfortunate that we cannot choose who greatness is given to particuarly objective greatness, the kind that can be quantified, by points and runs and touchdowns. The men and women bestowed with these gifts are saints, sinners, and harlots alike. The best we can do is acknowledge it when it stares us in the face. No matter who they are, even when the leave us wanting as we plead.

But my favorite passage combines the arguments against the amorphous clutch of the first passage and the vague fatalism of the second. It's one that can be easily overlooked because it's argument against conventional wisdom is not entirely blatant, and it doesn't have a final hook that is instantly quotable. Instead it reads like this.

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.

That last phrase is especially beautiful, a hidden gem because of its simplicity, because of it's applicability. In most parts of our lives what can be deemed success or deemed failure are as interchangeable as the two sides of a nickel, and ultimately they're just as consequential as the flip of that coin. Most summers don't end in a championship or even in a pennant race, most of the things we do at work will have no effect on the world at large or even on anything, and the largest challenge we might have all day is trying to be nice to the person in the drive-thru who is slow filling our order. Is there any reason to give 100%, under those circumstances, when there is little difference between "a thing done well and a thing done ill?" It's easy to go through the motions, it's very difficult to perform your craft for it's own sake, when the weather is always hot, the crowds are always sparse, and the home team always seems to be down by 5.

I think it's particularly apt that Updike wrote this passage about baseball, and not the sport that had already started to supplant it as the American pasttime, football. Football as an institution is parallel to the life of a celebrity. Every game is played in front of a packed house, the short schedule requires total concentration and places enormous importance on every game. It's a game best represented by it's signature event, the Super Bowl, something so big that it attracts scores of people who couldn't tell you what teams were playing in the game. Contrast that with baseball, which as an institution is much closer to the life of your everyman. The season is as long as the Nile River coming up from Lake Victoria and snaking through the Sahara Desert known as June through September. Teams that are out of it by the middle of May slosh mercilessly through game after game against those who still have a shot- but every team has to cross that Sahara, sometimes just so they can come in last. It's a game best represented by that classic situation that Updike mentioned, that hot August game with nothing at stake, the stands have a good chance of being half empty, and even people who could tell you the on-base percentage of every player on the field probably aren't bothering to watch.

I'm not entirely sure about where it all connects- Updike's ideas on clutch and fate, and Gods not answering letters. But it all reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the Wire. During the third season, a character by the name of Cutty who has just gotten out of prison after 15 years is trying to get on the straight and narrow by doing some honest landscaping work. The man he's working for has been out of prison for a while, and he describes to him what his life will be like- getting up early in the morning, standing in the hot sun, back hurting, for only a little pay. At the end of his speech he tells him- "You want to be on the straight, there ain't no big reward. This is it, right here," he says pointing at the ground next to the lawnmower. The "right here" he mentions, that's a person's knowledge of a thing done well, and, in no way am I being pessimistic, that's the only reward most of us are going to get. That tissue thin line between "well" and "ill" IS our reward for a career well spent or a life well-lived. When Updike spoke of the "vulgarity of the clutch player," I think he was getting at those who step over that line only when it suits them. Those that save their best for the lights and crowds are by definition slackers during the regular times that make up the bulk of any athletes career, of any humans life. Actually caring about the difference between the two sides of the line, even when very few people are looking- that's something very close to honor in my book. Not to say, of course, that those who perform in the lights don't deserve special recognition or that they are lacking in honor- but that does not mean that we should underrate those who perform admirably when the stakes are little lower too. With that being said- Well done Mr. Updike- it was honor reading you.