At random 9/7

When I was little, my mother used to tell me stories about her college roommate at Ohio Wesleyan University, the niece of Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickie. When TV was introduced to our house in New York in the late 1940's, and shortly before the whole Dodger organization moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1954, amidst hisses of "Traitors!," my mother didn't let me waste my time with Yankee or Giant games; we were always glued to Channel 9, with Red Barber and the Brooklyn Dodgers. And that was okay with me. In those years, thanks to Rickie, Jackie Robinson had been introduced to the Club. And Roy Campanella and Joe Black. In those days, Brooklyn's baseball season was like a Greek tragedy, in which the team would inevitably lose. But, while everyone knew how it would end, no one ever knew quite why it would end. And so, in the fall of 1951, when the New York Giants were playing the Dodgers -- one of many "subway series" -- Bobby Thompson, with one swing of the bat, shut down the Brooklyn hopes by clouting a home run ("the short heard round the world") into the left field seats. Dodger fans were like no other, and they saw themselves like no other. They all saw themselves as somehow related, under the skin, and willing to stand up for another. A pin-stripe Yankee, for instance, didn't need the help of Dodger fan, but a Dodger fan could always use some help from anyone. This partisanship went for the TV announcers, too. I remember getting into an argument because I liked Red Barber, and my former friend (she was a girl, and pretty, too) liked Mel Allen, voice of the N.Y. Yankees. What flashed through my mind with fast-ball speed was the question, Should I risk losing Rhonda Pratt for good by defending Red? or my respect for self by giving-in to her silly prejudices? Being a sports fan is one of the sweet things about being an American child. A few years later, when I went off to school, very far away from Brooklyn, I lost interest. Or thought I had. It was, then, a strange sensation of being right there in Ebbets Field when I read the first few pages of Roger Angell's lyrical collective biography, The Boys of Summer. Here were Carl Furillo, Billy Cox, Duke Snider, Ralph Branca, Jackie Robinson, and all the rest of the boys I'd known as familiarly as the other guys in the neighborhood. Gil Hodges? He was one of the Dodger players who had helped us neighborhood kids know we all belonged to one another in a human web of harmless partisanship. Was there a main idea, or theme, in Angell's story? I think it was that in the game of baseball, you only have time to go round once, that the "boys" of summer are the young men of winter, and that the next time summer rolls around it will be too late for everything but memory. I'd have been willing to bet The Boys of Summer was the greatest sports book ever written, until a couple of weeks ago, when I read the history Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hilenbrand, and changed my mind. It was not only the movie made from the book that had completely bowled me over and brought tears to my eyes; it was the book, too. The book had not been one of those witless "written after the movie" jobs that you so often find shackled to a mediocre but popular film. Seabiscuit was the embodiment of the book's theme: that everyone deserves a second chance. The horse himself was less formidable-looking than most other racehorses; he was, in fact, downright shrimpy. And his legs, the core of a racehorse, were short and gnarled. The horse's owner, Charles Howard, had lost his young son in an auto accident, a tragedy that had led to his distraught wife's leaving him. The jockey, Red Pollard, much too large to be a jockey and blind in one eye, had been left to his own devices by his family during the Great Depression, and had virtually stumbled across Seabiscuit. The trainer, Tom Smith, a "lone plainsman," never uttered a word to men when a smile or a nod of the head would do as well, but had a magic way with horses. Each of these four was defective in some way, but working together they helped fix one another, draw one another out of their solitude. The book is not a "quick read." The writing is dense with detail, and Hillenbrand has carefully studied the transcripts of Seabiscuit's individual races, which must be to horse racing what choreographers' notes are to dancing. The very writing style comes to match the galloping of the hoofs. You find yourself out of breath after a long paragraph. Both The Boys of Summer and Seabiscuit: an American Legend read like good novels. Even though you realize that these events happened long ago, it doesn't much matter. In the hands of these skilled writers, they happen all over again.

(Dr. Nash, formerly of the Cottey College English Department, currently works in the College library on a research project.)