Importance of local sporting heroes always resonated with Roth

Sideline Cut:'Yeah, I wanted to be a famous baseball player" Philip Roth joked of his early ambitions in a recent television interview as he stood outside his childhood home in Newark. It should be no surprise that the big cheese of American fiction nourished the universal boyhood dream of immortality and fame through the theatre of sport. He fell in with 99.9 per cent of all living souls in realising very quickly that that was never going to happen.

And so like everyone else, Roth found something else to do, which in his case was to become the most provocative and brilliant fiction writer of the past half century.

But even as he scandalised the Jewish seniors in his formative years and pretty much everyone else along the way, the cacophony of cheering and radio/television commentary and score lines and the dazzling feats of great stars and the pure joy of playing games on the street can be heard in the background of so many of his books.

Sport, more so than Elvis or Sinatra, is the soundtrack to American life – you just have to walk up any street to hear it – and it bubbles away in so many of Roth’s books. And there was something of the sportsman’s acceptance about Roth’s recent decision to bow out of the writing game at the age of 78, with no great fuss or fanfare.

It is hardly a coincidence that the hero of what now seems to be Roth’s last book – Nemesis – was a “playground director” named Bucky Cantor, on whom the gods had conferred poor eyesight to confound the fabulously athletic frame. And so instead of fighting in the second World War, Bucky finds himself teaching sports to kids during a muggy summer when the local community was reaching a state of paranoia about the polio epidemic.

And when you read the brief synopsis of the stunning rise to grace in American Pastoral of Swede Levov, the preternaturally gifted high school star of basketball, football and baseball who became, at a very tender age, a symbol of pride and adoration in his local community, you could be reading about any of the myriad hurling and football prodigies who have sprung up in the townlands of Kilkenny or Tyrone down the ages.

“And how did this affect him – the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left-field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone-faced boy? Or was the mature-seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love?”

Isn’t that what is meant when GAA peo’’ple wonder about “what happened” to the great minors who never quite blossomed into the great senior players they were destined to become? That some of them lose in that very struggle?

The All-Ireland championship offers the best players – or at least those from the strongest counties – the chance to play in front of 80,000 people if they reach the final . . . to showcase their talents in front of a crowd equal to that of Wembley or Yankee Stadium or any of the great arenas you care to name . . . and to then return to the cradle of their local town where they are treated as special?

That is why, of all the sports taking place in New York this weekend, none will be more special to a few thousand Irish expatriates than the All-Star exhibition football match taking place in Gaelic Park and starring the pick of all Irish players over the past two years. The chance for some son of Kerry to point to his American-born youngster and say: ‘Look. There goes Tomás Ó Sé.”

For Swede Levov, nothing in the life that Roth traces will be as uncomplicatedly glorious as his few years as a sports star – Paradise Remembered, as the book’s opening phase is entitled – even if those feats matter more to those around him than they ever did to him.

But all through Roth’s long writing life runs a thread which celebrates the plain exultation of sport and health and exercise. Just as the first paragraph of his first book starts off with a girl swimming in a pool, the very last paragraph of his late masterpiece Everyman revives the memory of the hero as a boy, “whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way to the shore.”

And towards the end of Nemesis, Bucky Cantor has the absolute attention of his young charges as he teaches them how to throw the javelin. “Through him, we boys had left the little story of the neighbourhood and entered the historical sage of our ancient gender.”

Bucky and Swede are the heroes of Philip Roth’s imaginative landscape. But they are recognisable to all of us. Everyone has met them or has their own substitutes for them – the sportsman so graceful he cannot be envied, the inspirational coach and, of course, the sports fan.

When a genuine sports hero leaves the stage, it is to garlands and tributes and a rerun of his best moments.

It can’t be so in the writing world but even so, Roth’s didn’t so much bow as slink away, casually mentioning during an interview with an obscure magazine in October that he was “done with writing”.

Reaction to the news was surprisingly muted and it was fairly well blown out of the water by the revelations concerning ex-General Petraeus.

But if there is a certain sadness that comes with the knowledge that Philip Roth is not even now dreaming up another Swede Levov, there is a consolation in knowing he might find time to go and enjoy a baseball game.