Everything They Had (16 page)

That summer and fall, I was back in Vietnam; it was a bad time for me. The American mission was optimistic (this was just before Tet) and I was pessimistic, convinced that 500,000 men had managed only to stalemate the other side. I hated the futile violence of the war. It was not a face of America I was comfortable with, and the combination of the flawed commitment—so many men and so much hardware to do a job which could not be done, and the self-deception which accompanied it had put me in a grim mood. That was also the season of Yastrzemski; that summer and fall when I was not out in the field, I would go over to the AP office. Saigon was 12 hours different from Boston and so the results of the night games would tend to come in about 11
A.M.
There was also a man who hung around the AP office, for the same reason: Doc, as he was known. Doc was Dr. Tom Durant, a Boston doctor helping the Vietnamese with their medical training (he is now assistant director of Mass. General), and each morning I would meet him there, bonded by this need to escape, and this common passion, and we would follow the results of a wonderful pennant race and perhaps the greatest one-man pennant drive in modern baseball history by standing over the AP ticker. I felt very close to him; we never agreed in advance to meet at the office but indeed we always did. We would sit there in that small airless room, and we could almost see Yaz as he was in Fenway, the exaggerated stance; it was all oddly exhilarating. Each day the heroics seemed even more remarkable, the box score would come clicking over the printer—Yaz, 2 for 4 with two RBIs—and then, more often than not, the mention of some extraordinary catch as well. In what was for me a bad season, his was a marvelous season and it reminded me of the America I loved, and which otherwise seemed quite distant. I have felt fondly of him ever since, and my affection has weathered even the current hokey hot dog commercials.

That next year I became a citizen of New England again, buying a home in Nantucket, connecting myself once again to Boston sports coverage, which now in modern times seemed to make the Red Sox players larger than life (Williams had played 25 years too soon, I suspected; he should have played in an era of semi-monopoly journalism) and returning to Fenway once again. I had remembered it as a small shabby park, an embarrassment after the grandeur of the Stadium, but now I saw it differently; in an age of antiseptic ballparks, gimmicky electronic scoreboards, fans who cheered every pop fly, it was a real ballpark. Going there was like going back in time, stepping into a Hopper painting. It must have been like this, I thought, when Smoky Joe Wood was ready to pitch. I had rooted for the 1975 team, a glorious and exciting team in a wonderful Series, wondering what might have happened if there had been two Luis Tiants instead of one. Then in 1978, for the last time, I faced the question of divided loyalties, the human heart in conflict with itself, to use Faulkner's phrase. I was no longer an automatic Yankee fan, but that was a good and gritty Yankee team, Munson-Nettles-Chambliss-Piniella-Jackson-Hunter, a Gabe Paul rather than a Steinbrenner team, not yet contaminated by the worst of all baseball owners. I like the chase as much as anything else, and that summer I found myself cheering the late-season New York surge. It was also a very good Red Sox team as well, Rice-Lynn-Yastrzemski-Evans-Fisk, weaker as usual in pitching. The season was as good as any I have ever seen, the early, seemingly insurmountable Boston lead, the feral, almost ruthless late Yankee surge to reclaim part of first place. One hundred sixty-two games played and both teams dead even—that was not a flawed season, that was an almost perfect season. Of that in the bitterness of postmortem charges and countercharges, there was much talk about a Red Sox collapse. I never believed it. The Yankees, as usual, had a demonstrably better pitching staff. Perhaps, I thought, the key moment took place six years earlier when the Red Sox made one of the worst trades of modern times, swapping Sparky Lyle for Danny Cater. Lyle was then young, a proven lefthanded reliever, 53 saves in his last three seasons; Cater was a good, albeit limited, pinch hitter. Lyle was the perfect relief pitcher for the Stadium and he gave an improving Yankees team exactly what it needed, a kind of instant late-inning legitimacy. In seven years as a Yankee, he had 141 saves, and in that year, 1978, when his star was already in descent in New York (Goose Gossage had arrived and Lyle went, said Nettles, from Cy Young to Sayonara in one season), he nonetheless had nine saves and a 9-3 record. In a season where two teams end up with the same record, that was all the difference the Yankees needed.

That team is gone: Piniella as manager and Randolph and Guidry are the only survivors. In the age of narcissus, Steinbrenner is the perfect modern baseball owner now, the bully as owner (if Tom Yawkey was flawed because he loved his players too much, Steinbrenner is flawed because he envies them their talent and youth and fame too much). He has won the tabloids, and lost the team. The 1978 team struck me as one which was bonded together by a mutual dislike of him; now, eight years later, his act has played too long, he is the national bore, and contempt has replaced dislike. It's not easy, in an age of free agency, to screw up owning a baseball team in the media capital of the world, but he has done it. The team is a wonderful extension of him, overpaid, surly, disconnected; the quintessential Steinbrenner player is Rickey Henderson. I do not doubt his talent, indeed his brilliance, but he seems, whenever I watch, in a perpetual sulk, entirely within himself, and watching him is almost as much fun as watching Carl Lewis during the 1984 Olympics. In this year I wish the Red Sox well, I did not think it was a good race, there was too much stumbling around. In a personal sense, if I am pleased for anyone, it is Don Baylor; trashed by Steinbrenner, he gained the sweetest kind of revenge, hitting against righthanders. His trade subtracted character from the Yankees and added it to the Red Sox. And I rooted as well for Tom Seaver, carried in this season as much by a feral instinct to compete as by natural skill, awesome if not in talent anymore then in toughness of mind.

If the Red Sox stumble through, however imperfectly, then I am pleased, for there have been enough very good Boston teams which, playing far better baseball, had their pennants denied. If they win, so be it: The gods owe them one.

On this semi-beautiful day, with the sun making a mere cameo appearance, spring finally arrived in Boston. The Red Sox opened in Fenway, limping in slightly, and none too soon, since their record was 1-4.

In a nation with so little ritual that our morning television shows search desperately for any vestige of it and will cover almost anything—the wedding of minor British princes who are commercial representatives of the crown, and the death and funeral of a Japanese emperor whom they never covered in life—Opening Day is one of our few ceremonial moments.

It marks, particularly in a city like this where the winter is so harsh, not merely the opening of an athletic season, but a benchmark on the calendar. What precedes is winter. What follows is spring. On Opening Day, Lou Boudreau once noted, there is no past, all is future and hope.

I think he is both right and wrong: I think the attraction, particularly in a ballpark like this, is that it blends both future and past as almost nothing else in our lives. We celebrate not just the beginning of something new, but the remembrances of the past when we were younger. It is an occasion both regenerative and filled with nostalgia, filled with the fragments of a child's memories. It is for many males of my generation the place where we were first brought by our fathers, and where we first shared their world.

Lou Gorman was discoursing on this before the game when, surrounded by reporters, he was allowed to speak on subjects other than the future of Wade Boggs. Gorman is 59 now, and he first came here 50 years ago when he was 9.

“It was Ted Williams' first season, but I didn't know that, although he became my favorite player,” said Gorman. “My father took me. We lived in Providence then and we drove up, and the trip up seemed to last forever, you know what a kid's impatience is like. We got here, and the park seemed so large. Every Opening Day still reminds me of it. I was hooked.”

That same season, I told him, I was 5 and my father took me to Yankee Stadium and he had pointed out the great Joe DiMaggio in center field and told me to watch him go from first to third on a single, which I did, though in truth I had no idea what he was talking about.

Gorman and I, who had never met before, were now joined by this connecting link of our first seasons half a century ago. “Remember the marvelous color of the grass,” I suggested. “The grass was never so green,” he said.

It is true that the ritual seems to mean more in Fenway, a surviving park from the pre-modern age. Its very imperfections in an age of perfect dimensions and grassless grass are comforting to me. When I enter the park, I now have a feeling that I am walking into a Hopper painting, and that Smokey Joe Wood will be pitching. The only thing that at first seems to have changed from those wondrous photos of 60 and 70 years ago is that the men no longer wear hats and ties.

That sense of the past is emphasized by the players themselves, who seem more than in any other sport to be part of a direct genetic line with their athletic forebears. They are not the overwhelming new physical specimens that abound in other sports. Rather, they are, in height and weight, not that remarkable. What sets them apart is in the shoulders and chest. They are, by type, chunky compared to their fellow Americans, all the Red Sox, that is except Oil Can Boyd, who seems almost unbearably slim and frail looking, and with his glasses, looks like a slightly studious graduate student who has wandered into the wrong office.

On this day, the sense of excitement is palpable. Being a Red Sox fan is like having a calling: they are by breed and training hardier and more loyal than fans elsewhere, at once shrewder, more tolerant and, yes, more loving than most of their counterparts elsewhere, and they are ready for the new season.

Everyone seems to be at the park earlier than usual. Wade Boggs, a man who ritualizes every part of his baseball endeavors, is the first to work out, and was throwing before anyone else was on the field. He is a man who comes to the ballpark at certain hours, throws at certain hours, takes grounders at certain hours. Mr. Boggs is not just a marvelous hitter with a remarkable capacity to concentrate and focus on baseball in the midst of what would be at the very least distracting to most of his teammates and fellow countrymen, but he has become now a celebrity of the first magnitude. In recent weeks, he was featured on
20/20
with Barbara Walters, the equivalent of what the
Time
magazine cover used to be, and confirmation that his celebrityhood, hard won though it may be, is now complete and is no longer confined to mere athletics. The preoccupation with Boggs, the endless stream of journalists gathering to chronicle him and ask about him, is a reminder that the society changes, and the game changes.

Boston has changed and so has Fenway. The skyline of the city behind the right-field fence is noticeably different, markedly grander, and on this day it was the coach of the Harvard hockey team who was chosen to throw out the first ball, his entire team stationed behind him, all of them warmly cheered. Town has become gown and gown has become town, although the Clearys are more of the new Harvard than the old. (Years ago, when I was still an undergraduate at Harvard, Cooney Weiland was the hockey coach, and Mr. Cleary's father was a prominent referee. On one occasion, Weiland was berating the elder Cleary on a tough call, until finally someone from the athletic director's office came down and told Weiland to shut up, and to remind him that Harvard was in the complicated process of trying to recruit the referee's two sons.)

Nor is Fenway completely immune to change. The mutations within the park itself are relatively minor. There are some advertising signs and, yes, there is an electronic scoreboard. (Can it be that the Yuppie generation, with its profound sense of entitlement, began in those cities with electric scoreboards where it was deemed that the game itself was not enough to amuse the faithful and that new forms of entertainment must be added?)

I first came to this park in 1946 when I was 12. The Red Sox of my childhood were every bit as heroic as the Yankees, and their names were Williams, Doerr, Pesky and DiMaggio. The numbers of both Williams and Doerr have been retired and now adorn the right-field fence, and Mr. Pesky still dresses regularly for the games. He is an assistant to the general manager and, by his reckoning, this is his 46th Opening Day at Fenway. As such, he admitted, he woke up nervous today.

The fact that Boston had gotten off to a bad start, 1-4, did not bother him that much since he had seen a good many other bad starts in what is truly a long season, and he could remember a good many comebacks. He had told Bob Stanley before the game not to worry, that in 1948 Boston had gotten off to an even worse start.

“I think we were fifth or sixth,” said Pesky. “We were terrible. Then we began to come back. On the last day we tied Cleveland and we had the one-game playoff.”

There would not have been a tie, I suggested, if Charley Berry, the umpire, had not blown the call on a ball that Lou Boudreau lined foul to right field off Mel Parnell.

“You're right,” he said. “Everyone in the park knew it was foul. Berry blew it. It gave them two runs and those were the only runs they got off Parnell that day. He calls it right and maybe there's no need for a playoff.”