Updike on The Splinter

I realized that I wrote an entire Updike post without including any quotes, which seems criminal, but I also don't have my copy of Rabbit, Run handy. Instead, I'm including some lines from Updike's famous article entitled Hub Fans Bid Kind Adieu. It's one of the finest pieces of sport writing of all time.

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.

What a perfect description of Fenway. I don't think it's possible to improve on any word in these two sentences.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention.

You really feel like you're sitting down next to these people. Again, perfect.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, 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.

This is such a poignant observation and it's something that any sports fan can attest to. There are times when a game, or a storyline or a season seem to play out in such a way, that if it were a film, it would be dismissed as saccharine, or unbelievable or completely far fetched. It's as if the players, fans and officials have a sense of the moment that transcends the actual game, and there is a collective, subconscious effort that impels the chain of events to dramatic perfection.

The above quote describes the buildup to Ted Williams' final at-bat of his career, where he smashed a monstrous homerun into the bullpen at Fenway, and then famously refused to acknowledge the crowd or tip his cap. He never emerged from the dugout again.