esrosedotblog

AMAYSING GRACE

Pete Hamill writes like an angel.

A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball. This was before 30 major-league teams were scattered in a blurry variety of divisions; before 162-game seasons and extended playoffs and fans who watched World Series games in thick down jackets; before the D.H. came to the American League; before AstroTurf on baseball fields and aluminum bats on sandlots; before complete games by pitchers were a rarity; before ballparks were named for corporations instead of individuals; and long, long before the innocence of the game was permanently stained by the filthy deception of steroids.

In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays.

The number of people who remember those times is diminishing. Fast.

Many baseball fans today have no literal memory for it and some have put the memories aside. Awash in the glitz of the present enterprise, nee game.

I don't know whether to write about Hamill or Mays.

Both are a vanished breed. The hero who needs a historian to tell the story of his times. The historian who needs heroes.

Well, either.

Hamill is older than me by two years.

He didn't write the book.

Willy Mays: The Life, the Legend by James Hirsch

He wrote the review.

I came into baseball by way of the sand lot. The neighborhood softball game. I was something of a sissie but I could play softball. I had my career highs. They let me pitch once on a desperate day. Mostly I played right field as a lot of us little closet homos did. It is an old story. It isn't that we couldn't play the game. It was the idea that if we felt like we did about our other team members we thought we couldn't play the game.

Years later, I played it fine.

In any case, if you played softball, you knew baseball. You had a team. You followed the team. You read about them in the paper. You listened about them on the radio. You listened to the games.

I was a Brooklyn Dodgers Fan. The opposite of a Giant's fan.

But everyone loved Willy. He transcended sides. He broke the barriers.

Hamill was probably in the same boat as I was. Same age. Irredeemably straight but we meet at the same point. Baseball. Willy. Actually his kid pictures look a little sissyish.

Stan Cheslock, an irredeemably straight pollock kid with a breathtaking body was my Willy Mays tutor. He was also, obviously, a Giant's fan. He lived over a store where I worked and was in my class at school. We would yak during breaks and when I was supposed to be breaking down cartons out back. Stan's Dad was the store's butcher.

When Stan talked, I listened. So I learned a lot about Willy Mays and the Giants.

Hey. Learning occurs as a result of various stimulations. Mine was talking to Stan with his shirt off while he was shooting hoops. He was also the school basketball star. And totally entwined with Effie Rider. When together they were seamless.

Funny but Mays had a build just like Stan. The same musculature. Another entwinement. But it helped make the story stick.

I started paying almost as much attention to Mays as I did to Stan.

I didn't discover Pete Hamill until I was reading the Village Voice in the old days. The 60s or the 70s. Before it got all weird and shit. Corporate. Like baseball, fucked and fucked up.

Hamill is a ballsy writer. A little like Stan Cheslock in print. Muscly. Spare. Could hit the basket, swish. Every time. A peerless workman. And a gift of gab that he could write out. Irish to the core. Ethnic. Poland isn't that far from Ireland. But Hamill is totally New Yawk. I never saw him with his shirt off.

Very nice. Willy and Mike. And here they are together on the same page. Stan couldn't make it, except in my mind'e eye. He is here in spirit.

I haven't read the review yet. I probably won't get the book. I am not much on bios and, I think, Stan Cheslock told me the entire story anyhow. They way I want to hear it anyhow.

Labels: books, nostalgia, sports