The best passage by far springs from the typewriter of Updike, with his famous farewell to Ted Williams in his last game at Fenway Park in 1960.
Edited By David Remnick, Random House, 498 pp., $30 As you're stuffing vacation reading material into your beach bag, you're probably not thinking the New Yorker.
But the magazine has a terrific new sports anthology to go with your snacks and sunscreen. "The Only Game in Town" is a collection of 32 articles spanning eight decades by a splendid array of writers, including Ring Lardner, Don DeLillo, Lillian Ross, Calvin Trillin, Susan Orlean, Haruki Murakami and the Johns: Updike, McPhee and Cheever.
We sit in the bleachers with Smokey Joe Wood, pedal over a mountain with Lance Armstrong, line up a putt with Tiger Woods. And though boxing and baseball are often deemed the most literary, scribe-friendly sports, this anthology veritably teems with basketball.
Extra-large assessments of Yao Ming and Shaquille O'Neal are joined by McPhee's elegantly written, masterpiece of a profile from 1965 on college phenom Bill Bradley -- future Knick and U.S. Senator -- who "glides through the air with his back to the basket, looks for a teammate he can pass to, and, finding none, tosses the ball into the basket over one shoulder, like a pinch of salt."
Bradley, who played "Climb Every Mountain" from "The Sound of Music" to get psyched up for games, was an only child seduced by the sound of the swish who found solace in endless afternoons on a playground "where the fundamental narcotic of basketball entered his system."
Henry Louis Gates Jr. contributes a smart and revealing portrait of the marketing machinery swirling around Michael Jordan in his prime. Both the Bradley and Jordan pieces read like spot-on preamble to LeBron James. What was is again.
There is also a wickedly well-written story by Cheever from 1953 about fathers, sons, death and baseball.
Other stories blew me away with the power of their reporting and prose and humor -- Nancy Franklin hilariously speaks to our universal fear of dark, dank basements, then explains the joys of pingpong -- but editor David Remnick picked a few clunkers.
Anthony Lane, William Finnegan, Herbert Warren Wind and Malcolm Gladwell offer rather drab takes on the Olympics, surfing, golf courses and choking in sports. Perhaps Remnick, who edits the New Yorker, felt he owed it to some staffers, past and present, to include them regardless.
Luckily, the winners well outnumber the duds.
Ted Williams bids farewell to Fenway Park on Sept. 28, 1960. Fortunately, one of the 10,454 fans was John Updike.The best passage by far springs from the typewriter of Updike, with his famous farewell to Ted Williams in his last game at Fenway Park in 1960. Williams, the eternal loner and probably the greatest hitter who ever lived, loathed the press and barely tolerated the people in the stands. "His basic offense against the fans," chirps Updike, "has been to wish that they weren't there."
Williams' bitter and awkward farewell speech mercifully ends, and the nervous crowd, "like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief."
In 14 concise and poetic pages, Updike, both snarky skeptic and star-struck fan, weighs Williams' career, which concluded with the perfect punctuation mark: a glorious home run in his final at bat.
Williams subsequently skipped the last road trip of the Red Sox season, not wishing to sully his exquisite exit. Likewise, Updike knew when to get off the stage with the crowd still cheering. Although he went on to write hundreds of stories and reviews for the New Yorker, he never wrote about baseball again.
Clint O'Connor is the film critic of The Plain Dealer.