Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”
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What classic baseball story does Louisa Thomas discuss?
Louisa Thomas is our sports correspondent, and she naturally gravitated to a piece about baseball. A piece with a title that is comprehensible only if you're a baseball nut or a reader of Variety magazine. And the title is Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu. The kid in question, of course, was Ted Williams, the great hitter who spent 19 years on the Red Sox, torturing us Yankee fans. And it's by no lesser writer than John Updike. Updike describes Ted Williams' last game on the Red Sox, his very last game before he retired in 1960. Louisa Thomas lives in Boston, just a few miles from Fenway Park.
I actually was teaching this piece by John Updike about Ted Williams to a nonfiction creative writing class that I teach at Harvard. And this is one of those pieces that I refer to sometimes when I need to enter the right voice. when I sort of need to remember how to start, when I need to sort of get in the mood. This piece is so good at mood, so good at beginnings.
Who was John Updike and what is his connection to Ted Williams?
Fenway Park in Boston is a lyric little band box of a ballpark.
I love that opening line.
Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934 and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between man's Euclidean determinations and nature's beguiling irregularities.
What I know about the genesis of the story is what he told us. In 1977, he published a reprint of this in a slender little volume, and he wrote an introduction. And he said in the introduction that his plan had been to go visit a paramour on Beacon Hill. He was married, but his marriage was dissolving. And he knocked on the door, and his paramour was not there. So he went to the game instead, to Fenway Park, to watch Ted Williams play in his last game. And he was so moved by what he saw that he felt compelled to write about it.
I and 10,453 others had shown up, primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder known to the headlines as Ted, Kid, Splinter, Thumper, T.W., and, most cloyingly, Mr. Wonderful, would play in Boston.
What are the key themes in Updike's writing about Ted Williams?
Ted Williams was this boyhood hero. Sometimes, you know, we can go back and find all the great reasons that Updake loved him. But I think some of them were, you know, born out of a child's imagination. There's a lovely passage, actually, in the piece that he wrote about how Ted Williams was originally always this line in a box score.
My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, Williams' LF was a figment of the box scores, who always seemed to be going three for five. He radiated from afar the hard blue glow of high purpose.
He felt a sort of sympathy with him because Updike was this great practitioner of his craft, as Williams was. And they both cared tremendously about these details. And there was something so pure about the way they took their swings.
Whenever Williams appeared at the plate, pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter's box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity, it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday evening post covers. This man, you realized, and here perhaps was the difference greater than the difference in gifts, really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it. He smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and casual east wind defeated him. The ball died.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What classic baseball story does Louisa Thomas discuss?
0:33–1:50
2
Who was John Updike and what is his connection to Ted Williams?
1:50–3:18
3
What are the key themes in Updike's writing about Ted Williams?
3:18–8:37
4
How did the crowd react to Ted Williams's final game?
8:37–12:28
5
What does Louisa Thomas reveal about Updike's writing process?
12:28–12:51
6
Who was Charles Strouse and what is his legacy?
12:51–13:31
7
What rivalry did Charles Strouse have with Stephen Sondheim?
13:31–25:41