Taken to the ballpark by Warriors
Updike, who passed away this year, was once in Boston to visit a friend. He knocked on the door, received no answer, so with a summer’s afternoon to kill, he headed to the Red Soxs’ famous old home, Fenway Park, for his first visit. He picked a good day. While the press box was bloated with the city’s jaded baseball beat reporters, Updike, like a scientist who inadvertently discovers a much sought-after remedy, found he was witnessing, from the bleachers, the last game — and the memorable farewell — of Sox giant Ted Williams.
He dispatched a song of a report to the New Yorker magazine recounting poetically William’s typically cranky so-long speech and the home-run that was the denouement to a heroic career at bat. “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the centre 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.” Wow.
