fun at the very use of the word. I feel myself pushing away from it when not unavoidably in his proximity. Players see me in the stands next to Tim, ask me later if I’m a part of that ever-present cadre of rooters, and I feel myself distancing, avoiding the reality that when I’m in the clubhouse, surrounded by individuals consumed with competitive excellence, I long to see them all from Tim’s perspective again. I know how Tim seems to the players, and sometimes to me, and maybe sometimes to himself. He is a man who is attached to nothing—no job that means more than a paycheck, no family that wasn’t the family of his childhood, no voiced desire for wealth or accolades, for any fantasy. His craft, like his fraternity, is his appreciation of things.
The arguments are common enough.
Maybe religion was once the opiate of the masses, but now it’s sports.
Every sad sack wants a chance to win.
Those who cannot do root.
But that can’t be it. You can’t reduce a lifetime of devotion to that—those born unremarkable living vicariously through those who are better, a stranger’s body serving as everybody else’s metaphor for the type of perfection they will never achieve.
The most frighteningly poignant account of fandom I’ve ever read was
A Fan’s Notes
, a novel that was really memoir. But even that narrator, looking out from the depths of alcoholism, from the back room of an insane asylum, devalued his own infatuation.
“It was very simple really,” he wrote. “Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, [his jock hero] Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his.”
So the shortcomings of one man’s life and art are confirmed, sublimated, ultimately soothed, by the effortless beauty of the art of another’s body. Is that really Tim, then? Is that his brand of devotion? Right now, as Nick warms up in the field, flipping the ball up over his shoulder, flexing, spinning, is Tim thinking about the things he cannot do, the things that have made him freeze and never leave Clinton, the way his body is aging into a stranger’s, that hole in the plaster of his living room ceiling?
Of course I’m thinking of my father now, and his voice, and all of those yellowed, overdramatic baseball books that he read to me, and the promises within them. I assumed and he hoped that he was reading a reflection of what I would become in protagonists like the Kid from Tomkinsville, the untainted Roy Tucker. The Kid is the attraction, made to be ogled, and that was what I should aspire to. The fans were written of as eager and malleable, nameless. The Kid, the great one, the lead, he looks up and sees them validated or deflated along with him, their own worth hanging on his lanky frame, a rabble that has to be there but not looked at head-on. I am rabble now. Everyone is rabble. And is Nick Franklin, in comparison, a born protagonist, or do I just need one, and he’s an easy fit?
There have been seventy-three bests in this town. Since 1937, there has been a star in Clinton, the only sure thing. Even in the worst years, when the team was in last place, one boy out of twenty-five presented something a little more hopeful than those around him. The best hitter in 1991, the year of all the giddy stories, when the Roadkill Crew traveled to every game and watched the team win its last championship, was Ricky Ward. His career ended in AA in 1994. He’s the hitting coach on a rookie ball team in Oregon now and still part of Tim’s “we,” when Tim chooses to remember him.
I don’t care about Ricky Ward when Tim describes him. A solid kid.A tough kid. Didn’t come from anything fancy, so everybody here could relate to him. Swung like he was pissed off at something. Great, fine, that doesn’t mean anything to me, no face to it, no surprises. And maybe in five years, certainly in twenty, nobody will care about Nick Franklin. So what does that say about Tim,
The arguments are common enough.
Maybe religion was once the opiate of the masses, but now it’s sports.
Every sad sack wants a chance to win.
Those who cannot do root.
But that can’t be it. You can’t reduce a lifetime of devotion to that—those born unremarkable living vicariously through those who are better, a stranger’s body serving as everybody else’s metaphor for the type of perfection they will never achieve.
The most frighteningly poignant account of fandom I’ve ever read was
A Fan’s Notes
, a novel that was really memoir. But even that narrator, looking out from the depths of alcoholism, from the back room of an insane asylum, devalued his own infatuation.
“It was very simple really,” he wrote. “Where I could not, with syntax, give shape to my fantasies, [his jock hero] Gifford could, with his superb timing, his great hands, his uncanny faking, give shape to his.”
So the shortcomings of one man’s life and art are confirmed, sublimated, ultimately soothed, by the effortless beauty of the art of another’s body. Is that really Tim, then? Is that his brand of devotion? Right now, as Nick warms up in the field, flipping the ball up over his shoulder, flexing, spinning, is Tim thinking about the things he cannot do, the things that have made him freeze and never leave Clinton, the way his body is aging into a stranger’s, that hole in the plaster of his living room ceiling?
Of course I’m thinking of my father now, and his voice, and all of those yellowed, overdramatic baseball books that he read to me, and the promises within them. I assumed and he hoped that he was reading a reflection of what I would become in protagonists like the Kid from Tomkinsville, the untainted Roy Tucker. The Kid is the attraction, made to be ogled, and that was what I should aspire to. The fans were written of as eager and malleable, nameless. The Kid, the great one, the lead, he looks up and sees them validated or deflated along with him, their own worth hanging on his lanky frame, a rabble that has to be there but not looked at head-on. I am rabble now. Everyone is rabble. And is Nick Franklin, in comparison, a born protagonist, or do I just need one, and he’s an easy fit?
There have been seventy-three bests in this town. Since 1937, there has been a star in Clinton, the only sure thing. Even in the worst years, when the team was in last place, one boy out of twenty-five presented something a little more hopeful than those around him. The best hitter in 1991, the year of all the giddy stories, when the Roadkill Crew traveled to every game and watched the team win its last championship, was Ricky Ward. His career ended in AA in 1994. He’s the hitting coach on a rookie ball team in Oregon now and still part of Tim’s “we,” when Tim chooses to remember him.
I don’t care about Ricky Ward when Tim describes him. A solid kid.A tough kid. Didn’t come from anything fancy, so everybody here could relate to him. Swung like he was pissed off at something. Great, fine, that doesn’t mean anything to me, no face to it, no surprises. And maybe in five years, certainly in twenty, nobody will care about Nick Franklin. So what does that say about Tim,
Similar Books
