RRC Archives

david james duncan in 'the brothers k' wrote:watching papa toe pitch through the years - the body language, the easy grace, the pure focus, time after time - any fan who didn't know him would have sworn that there was nothing more important to this man than the game he was playing. of course, his family knew better. most ballplayers' family members know better. but the good players are all like papa: their faces tell you nothing. and professional baseball is beautiful to watch largely because of this.

a pro contract is a kind of vow: a man agrees, in signing it, that he will perform as though his personal life, his family, his non-baseball hopes and needs do no exist. he is paid to aspire to purity. for the duration of every game he has not only to behave but really to feel that the ball park is the entire world: his body is his instrument, so any lack of this feeling will soon be reflected in his play. everett has poked fun at the analogy, but the purity of the commitment really isn't much different than that of the hinayana monks who peter so admired, they with their one robe, on bowl, one icon; ballplayers with their uniforms, their bats, their gloves.

but purity has a brutal side. sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger's girlfriend just ran off with the ups driver. sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop's baby daughter has a pain in her head that won't go away. and handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. pitchers don't ease off the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife's breast. baseball is not life. it is a fiction, a metaphor. and a ballplayers is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

...

on may 29, 1971, in the ninth inning of a home game against spokane, papa toe chance did the exact opposite. for just one pitch, he played ball not for the sake of his team or his art but for the sake of someone in the outside world. and though his team forgave him for it instantly, though even howie bowen forgave him for it eventually, papa, like cobb, was a purist. for himself he had shattered that metaphor. and he never threw another pitch.

steve almond in [i]ecstacy[/i] wrote:The real business of those years was experience: dawn confessionals and inside jokes, bouts of incompetent hedonism chased by flamboyant displays of empathy for the have-nots (whoever they were). What were we hoping for? An end to the lacerations of self, I guess. An alleviation of guilt. A single moment of emotional extravagance that would allow us to believe, wholeheartedly, in our youth. Grace.

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Solange was not a simple woman. She was deep and troubled, and she needed me. And I needed her. That was my idea of love: two people who fix one another. It hadn’t occurred to me then — this would take some years — that the best we can hope for in love is the graceful management of one another’s disappointments.

..

I suppose it might make sense at this point in my life — with a wife and a son and long afternoons of contentment drawn around me — to disavow my passion for Solange. Or, at the very least, to relinquish her memory. But you don’t relinquish anything when you’ve fallen in love, no matter how briefly. The heart writes in indelible ink.

And no matter how long you live and whom you love next, you are also there, all those years ago, with your head in her lap, your cheeks pressed against her thighs, her eyes and your eyes, and the future hung like a pear between you. And sometimes the memory is so beautiful you lose an entire life all over again; and even when you return to the present — to your place by the window, your wife warming soup in the kitchen, your son calling to you from outside — even then, it’s so beautiful you can’t tell the difference.