Play Ball!
An assortment of the sports books of summer.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

THE SOUL OF BASEBALL A Road Trip Through Buck O'Neil's America By Joe Posnanski Morrow. 276 pp. $24.95

First as a player for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League of the 1930s and '40s and later as the team's manager, Buck O'Neil did much more than collect base hits and victories. He gathered stories, on the field and off. He played, roamed and cavorted with Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. He rode broken-down buses and ran bases on weedy fields in seedy segregated towns, all of it with stellar athletes who were kept from the big leagues because they were black.

Joe Posnanski, a sports columnist for the Kansas City Star, caught up with O'Neil in 2005, when this grandson of a slave was 93. Just in time. Undertaking the obvious -- to mine O'Neil's memories while the gold was still there -- Posnanski traveled the land with the aging but ever-alert and lively star, who died last October at 94.

They were at Buck O'Neil Day at the Minneapolis Twin's Metrodome. They were in Washington, where O'Neil testified before a Senate subcommittee, asking that the Negro League museum in Kansas City be given a national designation. In Posnanski's caring and capable hands, O'Neil -- who finally made it to the majors as the first black coach -- shows no bitterness over having endured decades of racism.

To the end, Posnanski writes, "he still loved baseball. He loved people. He forgave, but so easily that it hardly seemed like forgiving."

-- Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, is the unpaid CEO of Home Run Baseball Camp at Friendship Playground in Washington.

THE REAL ALL AMERICANS The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation By Sally Jenkins Doubleday. 343 pp. $24.95

Fans and critics alike frequently describe American football as a metaphor for war. But if you think the rivalry between the Redskins and the Cowboys is fraught with tension and historic animosity, you're in for a shock. The Real All Americans, by Washington Post journalist Sally Jenkins, makes it painfully clear just how accurate that metaphor is: "The rising popularity of football had closely followed the ebbing of the frontier wars. It was as though America, at a loss for what to do with itself once the wilderness was subdued, had hit on football as an answer."

The foundation of the sport as we know it today was built in the university system around the turn of the 20th century. Jenkins focuses on the rise of the widely successful football team at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, inventors of the hidden ball trick and pioneers of the forward spiral pass. Given the violence perpetuated against the indigenous cultures of North America, the early competitions with the all-white and notoriously violent Ivy League powerhouses carried enormous symbolic implications. The descriptions of those games in particular, some of which featured Jim Thorpe, prove how clearly the history of the gridiron reflects the history of the United States -- and vice versa. Jenkins's painstaking research into the social context of the times makes The Real All Americans required reading for anyone interested in the complex ways that football -- arguably our real national pastime now -- still so accurately reflects our national identity.

-- Andrew Ervin's short story "The Phillie Phanatic" will appear in the next issue of Fiction International.

THE NIGHT CASEY WAS BORN The True Story Behind the Great American Ballad "Casey at the Bat" By John Evangelist Walsh Overlook. 220 pp. $25

Savants of baseball can supply the dates of heroics or ignominies and, if old enough, can tell you how they cheered or moaned as the events happened.

And then we have poetry and the mighty Casey of the Mudville nine. Who doesn't know the immortal final lines of the country's most enduring baseball poem?

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville -- mighty Casey has struck out.

This cadenced poem, in long-line quatrains, appeared on June 3, 1888, in the San Francisco Examiner. Its author was Ernest Thayer, a recent Harvard graduate and a native of Worcester, Mass., who had gone west to try his fortunes.

John Evangelist Walsh tells the story of the poem's creation as if its mythical Casey's whiff were a metaphor for all human failure. The author, who has also written biographies of Robert Frost, John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, offers all the historical details of 1890s baseball anyone could want. He explains, for example, that the 52-line poem would likely have been forgotten had it not been performed thousands of times on hundreds of stages by a comic opera star named DeWolf Hopper. In a book that is both Americana and nostalgia, Walsh swings for the fences -- and unlike Casey does indeed connect.

-- Colman McCarthy

TY AND THE BABE Baseball's Fiercest Rivals: A Surprising Friendship And the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship By Tom Stanton Thomas Dunne. 290 pp. $23.95

It was the ninth inning, a midsummer game in 1924. Ty Cobb's Detroit Tigers were four runs behind Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees. A Detroit pitcher, after throwing twice at the Babe's head, hit the next batter in the back. That was it. The Yankees charged onto the field, along with the police to contain the brawl. In the melee, Ruth sought out Cobb, challenging him to a fistfight.

The pair was kept apart by teammates who knew of the intense hatred between Ruth and Cobb. They might kill each other. Ruth and Cobb played on the same fields for 15 seasons, each setting records and each with an oceanic ego. Away from the stadiums where he thrilled the crowds with home runs, the Babe was a world-class hedonist. When he wasn't knocking 'em back in saloons, he was knocking up floozies in hotels. Cobb, a self-disciplined Mason from Georgia, had his own character defects, including racism and a foul mouth.

Though adulatory to both men, Tom Stanton believes that "the passing years have been unkind and unfair to [them]. They have been reduced to stark and shallow clichés." Maybe, but that discounts the many reputable biographies of Cobb -- by Al Stump in 1996 and Dan Holmes in 2004, to name two -- and the many more about Ruth, including last year's The Big Bam, by Leigh Montville.

The value of Ty and the Babe lies in Stanton's finely detailed story of the post-retirement reconciliation between the two men, then grownups tempered by life. They became golfing pals and staged exhibition matches. When Ruth succumbed to throat cancer in August 1948, Cobb said "I wish I could have been more like the Babe. When he died, an entire nation mourned." Including Cobb.

-- Colman McCarthy

1941 The Greatest Year in Sports By Mike Vaccaro Doubleday. 306 pp. $23.95

Mike Vaccaro looks at four major sporting achievements compelling enough to distract Americans' attention from the beginning of their nation's involvement in World War II. In one year, Whirlaway won the elusive Triple Crown of horse racing, the unbeatable boxer Joe Louis finally found a legitimate challenger, and in baseball Ted Williams hit for a record .406 batting average while Joe DiMaggio put together his incredible 56-game hitting streak.

The most personable character here, however, is the horse. Whirlaway's unique build and temperament made him not "just a once-in-a-lifetime horse but a once-in-everyone's-lifetime horse," whose enormous hold on the public imagination came at a time of tremendous fear: "Whirlaway wasn't eligible for the draft, so this was one burgeoning superstar upon whose shoulders a nation could rest its own athletic aspirations without worry." Vaccaro makes us appreciate the extent to which sports can inspire an anxious nation.

-- Andrew Ervin

MARADONA The Autobiography of Soccer's Greatest And Most Controversial StarBy Diego Maradona Skyhorse. 302 pp. $24.95

Maradona reads like the work of a retired politician tending to his legacy -- and cashing in while he can. Soccer legend Diego Maradona, with the help of two ghostwriters and a reverential translator, has delivered a masterpiece of self-celebration. The conventions of realism are not of primary interest here; he shares with his Argentine country mate Jorge Luis Borges a keen sense of the absurd. With only an infrequent outbreak of false humility, Maradona depicts himself as something larger than life itself. He glosses over the occasional scandal (such as failed drug tests and alleged mob ties), claims credit for every victory and shirks responsibility for every loss. Of his notorious game-winning World Cup goal against England in 1986, he writes, "At the time I called it 'the hand of God'. Bollocks was it the hand of God, it was the hand of Diego! And it felt a little bit like pickpocketing the English." Say what you will about Maradona, but in his prime he controlled the pitch like no one else.

-- Andrew Ervin

TALES FROM Q SCHOOL Inside Golf's Fifth Major By John Feinstein Little, Brown. 343 pp. $26.99

Each autumn, a thousand golfers -- from neophytes to aging pros -- enter Qualifying School tournament, but only 30 or so earn the cards that provide entry to the PGA Tour. Feinstein, the veteran sportswriter and Post columnist, brings the intense pressure of the contest to life with a master storyteller's eye for detail. "The last day at Q School can make the Last Supper look like a trip to a McDonald's drive-through," he writes. "Players can be seen changing clubs two or three times, walking off yardages they know cold, and lining up six-inch putts." Feinstein provides a fascinating, richly textured account of how the world of professional golf functions behind the scenes.

-- Andrew Ervin