Book Review : Rounding Third and Heading Home in a Late Inning of Life

Fathers Playing Catch With Sons: Essays on Sport (Mostly Baseball) by Donald Hall (North Point Press: $13.50)

A few years ago a writer named Geoffrey Stokes, who worked for the Village Voice, collected a series of essays on food and cooking, which he had written under the pen name of Vladimir Estragon. The book looked as if it were about food--there were theories and recipes and so on--but it was a book about identities: the name, Estragon, with both its literary and culinary allusions; the fact that each recipe was set in a context that dealt lovingly not just with shopping and cooking and timing and cleaning up, but with the family, the days of the week, the decade, the time in the century, etc., etc. . . . Well, you soon learned that Vladimir Estragon had written a book of philosophy, a diary of one examined life, along with his lists of ingredients.

And so it is in these pages. This is a book about sport--”(Mostly Baseball),” as it says in square brackets--and also about “Fathers Playing Catch With Sons,” throwing them information and love and so on (what a shame that pitching has become such a debased word here in Hollywood), and receiving a cultural curve ball right back.

The Dynamic of Change

Add to this the fact that Donald Hall is a poet--and a good one--and that he’s a man who’s gone through several “changes” in his life, and you see the dynamic here. Hall intimates that he used to drink--a lot--and now he doesn’t. He used to teach; now he’s a free-lance writer. He used to have one wife and one family. Now he has another.

How does this stuff happen? When you’re young, you can hardly figure it out. When you’re older, you know all too well. It’s, well, it could be something like when you’re a young ballplayer, you think you’re going to be young and strong forever. But somewhere ahead of you, there’s the “adjustment,” when you have to leave your past behind and go on to the next life. . . .

Fathers playing catch with sons. Donald Hall reminds us that he is overweight, and crazy about junk food. That when he was in high school and unable to make the team (it was unthinkable, really), he realized that as an “Ace Teen-age Sportscribe” he could at least get on the bus with those golden guys--and those twinkling cheerleaders.

Though he was, by the very action of observing, made even more of an outsider, still by the action of turning in his copy late at night, standing by bus stops in the cold dark (while everyone else in town was either out having fun or sound asleep), he found an identity for himself, which has carried him through every “adjustment.”

Dazzling Essay

What do you do about a life where, despite your best intentions, you don’t seem exactly to have “won”? In a dazzling essay on “Ping-Pong: Root Cellar Five Ball,” Hall, with the authentic economy of a fine poet, examines his career in that strange game. First, as a kid, he was not so hot. Then he practiced--alone--again and again and again, blamming his ball against the wall, until he got . . . “good.” Then, as a young competitive professor of literature, he remembers the Ping-Pong games where the young faculty “took out their aggressions,” as they say, destroying each other on a small field of green rather than in the pages of PMLA. And now, in a second marriage, Hall gently reminds us that winning and losing aren’t subjects a married couple should get into: “We play a game without points. We play root cellar-fiveball-pong, keeping five or six balls in play. . . . Continuousness is our game. . . . We flop on the table, we leap to volley . . . slam, cut, leap, scream, curse, serve, slam, cut, leap, scream, curse. . . . “

A nice metaphor for middle life, where the poet/writer/husband/sportsman may have put too many balls in play and there’s nothing to do for it now but play the game out with grace and laughs.

One feature of this little book is that, for all its shortness, its very repetitive phrases turn up once, twice, three times. An essay on an old-timer’s game turns from prose to poetry in one case--with the fans in the stands each time “rising to applaud weeping” . . . the “tall puffy player” who, in spite of age and physical gracelessness, makes a great catch, “Laboring Forward / Like a lame truck horse / startled by a garter snake.”

There will always be golden boys playing in games that have diamonds in them, and those boys will always get old, and life will change, but there’s something gently beautiful in that process. Baseball is one metaphor for the changing of seasons, and Hall--as poet and seer here--raises Sport to Art.