Updike's novel take on sport stirs awe and envy

LOCKER ROOM:The great prose master casually produced sporting masterpieces between novels, writes Tom Humphries

ON TUESDAY, while it was still media day at the Super Bowl here in Florida, the news came through that John Updike had died. Really, we should have abandoned the High Church wedding of banal questions and grunted answers that is Media Day and gone somewhere to bow our heads in an act of collective respect. The world is not like that, though.

I suppose milling around in the soupy humidity of a stadium in Florida there were many laptop jockeys who have never gone near Updike. They were the lucky ones. Anybody who ever cracked open the first of Updike’s incomparable quartet of books on an American life, that of the everyman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, will have been stilled by the knowledge they were reading not just the most perfect description of a pick-up game of basketball ever written but also reading a beautiful articulation of the crushing power sport has to remind you of how quickly and imperceptibly you have travelled into the land of being past it in every mind except your own.

“Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three . . .

“. . . The ball, rocketing off the crotch of the rim, leaps over the heads of the six and lands at the feet of the one. He catches it on the short bounce with a quickness that startles them. As they stare hushed he sights squinting through blue clouds of weed smoke a suddenly dark silhouette like a smokestack against the afternoon spring sky, setting his feet with care, wiggling the ball with nervousness in front of his chest, one widespread white hand on top of the ball and the other underneath, jiggling it patiently to get some adjustment in the air itself. The cuticle moons on his fingernails are big. Then the ball seems to ride up the right lapel of his coat and comes off his shoulder as his knees dip down, and it appears the ball will miss because though he shot from an angle the ball is not going toward the backboard. It was not aimed there. It drops into the circle of the rim, whipping the net with a ladylike whisper. ‘Hey!’ he shouts in pride. ‘Luck,’ one of the kids says.”

Sportswriting doesn’t come better than that. It doesn’t come more gorgeous or more perceptive anywhere except in other pages written by Updike. The rest of us with our leaky biros and digital tape recorders scramble around on the foothills or the summits he left us.

The worst thing is, of course, that Updike was so prodigiously brilliant he couldn’t write a milk note which wasn’t expansive, luminously written and deliciously publishable. Richard Ford, whose Frank Bascombe novels echo the Rabbit Quartet in theme and ambition, is a former sportswriter himself and makes Bascombe a sportswriter and frustrated novelist at the outset of his fictional career. Updike, though, just poured out the greatest sportswriting of the last 50 years because he found he had time on his hands.

Rabbit Run, the first of the Rabbit books, saw the light of day in 1960. That September (this story has always sickened me) Updike was in Boston to visit a friend. He called. She wasn’t in. He was a young man, two years older than Rabbit when we found him shooting hoops in the alley. So, with time on his hands, Updike dandered along to Fenway Park and found himself watching the last game played for the Boston Red Sox by the irascible Ted Williams.

Excited by what he had seen, he published in the New Yorker a few weeks later the greatest and most insightful piece of baseball writing, nay sportswriting ever, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. If I had written the first sentence of the piece, a description of Fenway Park which will be quoted forever, I would have laid down my pen with contentment and myself uttered the final word of the Rabbit quartet, the word which suggests our hero is ready to embrace death. Enough.

“Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”

Ah stop. Leave some room for those of us who have to hack out a few words to fill a space to earn our corn. He never stops, though.

Updike describes with lovely humour Williams’ cranky farewell speech which veered violently off course that he might chastise the pressbox or those “maestros of the keyboard up there”. Admitting he would never forget the insults that were written about him, Williams was, of course, unaware that sitting in the bleachers is Updike who is about to pen a piece so definitively wonderful it would absolve the sin of all slovenly sportswriters everywhere.

Anyway, Williams vows never to forgive, and then addresses the city of Boston, a town which he professes to love. “And he paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, ‘I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life.’ The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief.”

Updike wrote of Williams and his sport that “it is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy”.

Finally, Updike moves onto the game itself, to Williams’ final at bat and the almost inevitable final act of heroism wrapped in the cloak of the curmudgeon. Williams finishes his epic career with a home run.

“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.”

Gods do not answer letters! How gracefully forgiving that line is yet how slyly it barbs Williams’ inner view of himself. Williams, by the way, was later quoted as saying he didn’t think much of the Updike piece.

Ah well. Updike wrote all that as a young man between novels, a guy at a loose end on a pet day in Boston. He wrote greater stuff, mainly on sex, but his canon on golf is breathtakingly quotable also. To paraphrase Updike himself writing on Ted Williams, he wrote brilliantly always even on those occasions “when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill”.

He left behind such an ocean of perfectly chosen and well-arranged words that his casual mastery of our trade, while doing other more worthwhile things, might be forgotten. It was odd to learn of his passing down in steamy Florida, where he had his flawed hero Rabbit pass away also. He left us with a scrap of advice. Anytime he wrote, he said, he was aiming for “a little spot to the east of Kansas”. Find your own spot and take aim, he was saying. Enough. Adieu!