Dispatches from the Sporting Life (11 page)

In the morning we quit the Island Camp for nearby Lake Bogoria, pausing en route to marvel over the termite heaps that loomed everywhere, some of them twenty feet high, representing fifty years of labour. And then there were the gorgeous elands, the largest antelopes on earth, with their splendid corkscrew horns. Dr. Chris Hillman, of Nairobi University, writes: “The eland is the most common animal in bushman rock paintings. Louis Leakey reckoned it was second only to the giraffes, over the whole of Africa, for the frequency of depiction in prehistoric paintings and rock engravings.” And as we
approached the shores of Lake Bogoria itself, there was an endless swirling slash of pink, soon to be revealed as flocks of flamingos, thousands of them.

From Lake Bogoria, we scooted across the country to the Masai Mara, where we would camp for five days. Giraffes. Waterbucks. Herds of roaming elephants. Wildebeests. Prides of lions. Cheetahs. Leopards. Hippos. Crocodiles. Hyenas. Jackals. Baboons. But, above all, herds of exquisite antelopes and gazelles: impalas, topis, Thomson’s gazelle, and Grant’s gazelle. Gazelles, gazelles, breaking into a trot and, if alarmed, literally flying across the flat open country.

At first sight, the Masai Mara, its horizon endless, seems the most enchanting of pastoral scenes. All those grazing animals. This, you might think, is how things were in the Garden of Eden. But, on closer examination, it is most certainly not a peaceable kingdom. Put plainly, it’s a meat rack—those exquisitely frolicking antelopes and gazelles being coolly eyed by the predators on the plain, none more obscene than the loping, slope-shouldered hyena, constantly on the prowl. In the morning, these vile creatures are everywhere, their pelts greasy and bellies bloated.

One evening—a scene right out of hell, this—we came upon a pack of thirty-three hyenas, hooting and cackling as they fed on a freshly dead hippo. Finding the hippo hide an impediment—although hyenas have the strongest jaws of any animal on the plain—they had eaten their way in through the softer anus, emerging again and again with dripping chunks of meat or gut, thrusting the scavenging
jackals aside. The lion may be king of the animals, but, Mead assured me, he had seen a swift pack of hyenas move a lion off its kill more than once. Still, the lions are feared. One morning we caught two cheetahs gorging themselves on a wildebeest, eating hastily, constantly alert for lions that could rob them of their feast. But the lions are not invincible. Another time we came upon two lions on the hunt, attacking a herd of Cape buffalo. Eight of the buffalo formed a line, lowering their heads and charging, driving off the lions.

At twilight we watched the gazelles and antelopes cavort, a sight I never tired of, but, come morning, their skulls and rib cages would be strewn across the plain, being picked clean by vultures.

Our camp, neatly tucked into a stand of shade trees, was actually a corner that a bunch of baboons called home. Perched high and quarrelsome in the trees, they did not take kindly to our intrusion, pissing on our tents and pelting them with sticks at night. This, however, was not the only thing to disturb our sleep. After dark there came the shrieking of birds. Hooting hyenas on the prowl. Lions coughing. Once we wakened to find an elephant feeding on a thorn tree only six feet behind our tent.

After we turned in, zipping up our tents, a guard patrolled the camp all night, panga at the ready. He was there to protect not so much us but rather the kitchen tent from hungering hyenas, capable of biting right through a frying pan.

Weeks after our safari was done, I continued at home to awaken at 3:00 a.m. to afterimages of Africa. A Masai tribesman, his robes brilliantly coloured, his spear in hand, strolling casually toward us across the open plain. A leopard springing out of its cave and darting into the night. Adolescent topis at play, locking horns, testing themselves. Lions lazing in the sun or padding in a slow line through the tall grass. Elephants gathering their vulnerable young into the centre of their circle. And the giraffes, elegant beyond compare, always out there on the far horizon, looming over the trees.

Go, go, before it’s gone. Before the rough tracks of the Masai Mara are paved and hamburger havens and pizza parlours spring up and the Masai herdsman who approaches across the plain has his ears plugged into a Walkman. Or is talking into a cellular phone.

February 1983

W
hen I was a boy in Montreal, during the Second World War, my parents feared Adolf Hitler and his seemingly invulnerable panzers beyond all things, but my old bunch, somewhat more savvy, was in far greater terror of Mr. Branch Rickey. Let me explain. In those days our hearts belonged to the late, great Montreal Royals of the old International League. In 1939, the Royals signed a contract with Mr. Rickey—the baseball intellectual who built the legendary Brooklyn teams—making the club the Dodgers’ number-one farm team. Five years later, our club was sold outright to the Dodgers. This meant that come the dog days of August, the imperial Mr. Rickey could descend on our colony and harvest its best players to bolster the Dodgers’ perennial pennant drive. Gone, gone were Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Ralph Branca, Don Newcombe, and Carl Furillo just when we needed them most. My romance with baseball, still unrequited, goes back that far.

Since then, of course, there have been many changes in the game, some of them heartening but
most of them diminishing. Among the most heartening changes I naturally count the coming of major league baseball in the shape of those suddenly traditional bridesmaids, our very own Expos, to Montreal in 1969. Mind you, if once we lost our most gifted players to the majors, now that we are in the biggies ourselves we can’t even sign them. Take young Pete Incaviglia, for instance. He was the Expos’ number-one college-draft choice in 1985, but, obviously having majored in geography rather than haute cuisine, he didn’t want to come this far north. He was lost to the balmier climes of Texas, where in early July he was hitting.266, with thirteen home runs and forty-two RBIs (and I hope suffering heartburn on a daily diet of greasy ribs and twice-warmed-over chili).

As I am a supporter of Band-Aid, Oxfam, and food stamps, willing to join hands or rub noses across America any day, rain or shine, I am also relieved that the hardworking players (ruining their knees on artificial turf, risking skin cancer in the afternoon sun out there in stadiums as yet undomed) are now earning decent beer money. But I do sometimes worry about the owners’ generosity, making instant millionaires of many a.250 hitter or a pitcher with a bloated ERA. “It isn’t really the stars who are expensive,” the late Bill Veeck once said, “it’s the high price of mediocrity.”

One of the most depressing changes in the game has been the advent of the insufferably cute team mascot. Montreal’s very own Youppi, for instance, has led me to reconsider my hitherto impeccable stand on capital punishment. I preferred it when the
game was played out on the grass in the afternoon sun rather than on a carpet in glorified hangars.

Happily, there is a constant. Baseball’s clichés remain largely unchanged through the years. The mop-up pitcher with a 2–12 record will still complain, “If only they give me a chance to start, I know I can help this team.” Similarly, the utility infielder, batting.198, can be counted on to protest, “I know I’m a.300 hitter, but they’ve got to play me every day.” The manager, enduring a ten-game losing streak, is absolutely required to point out, “It’s a long season,” and if his team is going to be sacrificed to Dwight Gooden that very night, he will assuredly remind the fans, “The way I look at it, he gets into his trousers one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.” Of course, we can assume everybody between those white lines will give 110 percent, damn it, but the player who wins the MVP award this autumn is bound to kick the dirt and say, “I’m willing to trade in any individual awards for a World Series ring,” just as Peter Rose, Esq., will come clean at last when he retires in 2001, saying, “Individual stats never meant anything to me.”

Stats.

If there is anything really new in the game it is the sudden and sometimes bewildering proliferation of stats, which now go beyond the traditional BA, HR, SO and RBI to include such recherché items as RRF (runs responsible for), SA (slugging average), hits made during LIP (late-inning pressure), on grass or artificial turf, with two out, or fewer than two out, after a tiff with the wife or a night out on the town, etc., etc. I have resisted reading the new baseball mavens, however brilliant, because my fear has been
that they might diminish my joy in the game even as earlier intellectuals—Edmund Wilson being a case in point—arguably ruined vaudeville by analyzing it too closely. But Messrs. Seymour Siwoff, Steve Hirdt, and Peter Hirdt, compilers of
The 1986 Elias Baseball Analyst
—a volume that comes highly recommended by that fine baseball writer Thomas Boswell—have certainly stitched together a compendium of considerable value to the armchair manager or, come to think of it, the real managers. It helps, however, if you are not so much a fan as an addict and absolutely need to know that Dave Winfield’s career home-run percentage when facing left-handed pitchers is 5.36.

Bill James, the acknowledged pioneer in the field, has published two books this season:
The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1986
and
The Bill James Historical Abstract.
This master of Sabermetrics (the systematic, scientific study of baseball-related questions) turns out to be not only illuminating but also considerably charming and honest. “Hi,” he writes in his 1986 abstract,

His
Historical Abstract,
grand fun for browsing, rich in wacky asides, deserves a place on that small shelf reserved for essential baseball books such as Joseph L. Reichler’s
Baseball Encyclopedia,
sixth edition, revised in 1985; Jim Brosnan’s
Long Season;
Roger Kahn’s
Boys of Summer;
Jim Bouton’s
Ball Four;
Roger Angell’s
Late Innings: A Baseball Companion;
and Red Smith’s anthology of favourite sports stories,
Press Box,
which includes John Updike’s wonderful piece on Ted Williams’s last game at Fenway Park, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”

Of course, the best baseball book ever, published as long ago as 1916 but still fresh and acute, is Ring Lardner’s
You Know Me Al,
available again from Vintage Books, with an introduction by my colleague Wilfrid Sheed.
You Know Me Al,
a novel written in the form of letters home by Jack Keefe, a busher who catches on in the majors his second time out, was enormously appreciated by as unlikely a reader as Virginia Woolf. “With extraordinary ease and aptitude,” she wrote, “with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, [Lardner] lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us.” Lardner, Mrs. Woolf concluded, had talents of a remarkable order. Yes, indeed. He could be funny, very funny, but he also, as his son John
once noted, carried a sharp knife. Astonishingly,
You Know Me Al,
Lardner’s first novel, was originally written as a serial for the
Saturday Evening Post,
with the last installments earning Lardner 1,250 bucks. If the unassuming Lardner wrote it with an eye on the rent money rather than on posterity, there is no doubt that the upshot was an American classic. Lardner was an original, a writer with an impeccable ear and an enviable gift for clean prose. He was Mark Twain’s legitimate heir, perhaps, and an important influence on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And so I also urge you to read Lardner’s
Haircut and Other Stories,
which includes another superb baseball story, “Alibi Ike.” Here’s a short paragraph from that story:

In fact, you can’t go wrong reading just about anything Lardner wrote. But don’t take my word for it—you can look it up in H. L. Mencken. “Lardner,” he wrote, “knows more about the management of the short story than all of its professors.” I’m not going to
say any more, because as Ring Lardner Jr. once wrote of his father, “He thought all prefaces (and most literary criticism) were nonsense.”