Louisa Thomas
Staff writer
The original idea was an assignation. On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, “falling in love, away from marriage,” took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base.
He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. “It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. Updike captured not only the ball’s trajectory and its monumental effect but also the moment’s mix of jubilation and relief.
October 22, 1960
No one should have anticipated what Williams had done. He was forty-two; the Red Sox were bad; the air was heavy with impending rain; and the sky was so dark that the stadium lights had to be turned on—“always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession.” But it was Updike’s insight to see that everyone had expected it, and in fact it was that shared expectation that held them in their seats. “There will always lurk,” he wrote, “around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.”
The essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” ran in The New Yorker a few weeks later—white-hot speed by the publication’s stately standards. Its editor, William Shawn, wrote to Updike that it was the best piece about baseball the magazine had ever printed, which, Updike later allowed, was small praise, for among the “many prejudices” of the previous editor, Harold Ross, “was one against baseball,” and there had been few mentions of the sport in The New Yorker. Shawn’s judgment has not quite stood up over time. Two years after “Hub Fans” appeared, Roger Angell began covering baseball for the magazine, which he did so often and so well that he ended up in Cooperstown. Still, the original appraisal is pretty close to true. Angell, for his part, was always clear about his debt to Updike, and he was not alone. So much of the best sportswriting since then bears the hallmarks of Updike’s example: an elegant, natural tone; precise, surprising descriptions; pacing that neither impedes the drama nor does too much to drive it. His style and references can seem a little pretentious now. (A groundskeeper picks baseballs off the top of a wall “like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective.”) But Updike demonstrated that you could write about sports without a suspicious or cloying bent, or the access of a beat writer. He wrote, as he later put it, with the heart of a fan.
Updike never scratched an itch without putting it into a book, so it’s not a surprise that that trip to Fenway turned into an essay. Updike and Williams shared more than a little—an outsider’s perspective on Boston; a tall, lean physique; eyes that could drill a hole through the soul—but Williams, unlike so many of Updike’s fictional projections, also shared his genius. Williams’s talent was hitting a ball with a stick, whereas Updike’s was turning the world into crystalline prose. Yet they both carried something essential, “the hard blue glow of high purpose.”
Williams was the best pure hitter of his generation, maybe ever, but what fascinated Updike was his dedication to his craft. “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill,” Updike wrote. He saw Williams as a “loner,” and that batting, like writing, was a lonely, unforgiving art. What separated the good from the great, more than talent, was the quality and intensity of their care. Williams’s seemed to carry the ball out of the park, Updike observed. He knew what he was talking about.