Updike John - Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams

Also by John Updike

POEMS

The Carpentered Hen (1958) Telephone Poles (1963) Midpoint (1969) Tossing and Turning (1977) Facing Nature (1985) Collected Poems (19531993) Americana (2001) Endpoint (2009)

NOVELS

The Poorhouse Fair (1959) Rabbit, Run (1960) The Centaur (1963) Of the Farm (1965) Couples (1968) Rabbit Redux (1971) A Month of Sundays (1975) Marry Me (1976) The Coup (1978) Rabbit Is Rich (1981) The Witches of Eastwick (1984) Rogers Version (1986) S . (1988) Rabbit at Rest (1990) Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) Brazil (1994) In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) Toward the End of Time (1997) Gertrude and Claudius (2000) Seek My Face (2002) Villages (2004) Terrorist (2006) The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

SHORT STORIES

The Same Door (1959) Pigeon Feathers (1962) Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) The Music School (1966) Bech: A Book (1970) Museums and Women (1972) Problems and Other Stories (1979) Too Far to Go ( a selection , 1979) Bech Is Back (1982) Trust Me (1987) The Afterlife (1994) Bech at Bay (1998) Licks of Love (2000) The Complete Henry Bech (2001) The Early Stories: 19531975 (2003) My Fathers Tears (2009) The Maples Stories (2009)

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Assorted Prose (1965) Picked-Up Pieces (1975) Hugging the Shore (1983) Just Looking (1989) Odd Jobs (1991) Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996) More Matter (1999) Still Looking (2005) Due Considerations (2007)

CHILDRENS BOOKS

The Magic Flute (1962) The Ring (1964) A Childs Calendar (1965) Bottoms Dream (1969) A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

hub fans bid kid adieu

Hub Fans

Bid Kid

Adieu

John Updike on Ted Williams

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of Americas best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by Americas foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

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Published by The Library of America

14 East 60 th Street, New York, NY 10021 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced commercially by offset lithograph or equivalent devices without the permission of the publisher.

www.loa.org

Copyright 2010 by The Estate of John Updike

Copyright 1965, 1991, 2007 by John Updike

Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Frontspiece: Ted Williams ascends to the Fenway field, September 28, 1960. Photograph by Dick Thompson, Courtesy The Sports Museum, Boston.

Endpapers: From the setting copy of Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, mailed by the author to The New Yorker on October 5, 1960. Courtesy Houghton Library, Harvard University, by permission of The Estate of John Updike.

Case: The Kid knocks another one out of Fenway Park: a moment from the mid-1940s. Photograph by Leslie Jones, courtesy The Boston Public Library Print Department.

Distributed to the trade by Penguin Group USA Inc., and elsewhere by Tln, Buenos Aires, S.A., and in Canada by Penguin Group Canada Ltd.

Design by David Bullen Design

Library of Congress Control Number 2009934632

isbn 978-1-59853-071-1

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Printing

acknowledgements

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu first appeared in The New Yorker , October 20, 1960, and was reprinted, with added footnotes, in Assorted Prose (1965). Parts of Ted Williams, 19182002 first appeared in two essays, one in Sport , December 1986, the other in The New York Times Magazine , December 29, 2002; later versions were printed, respectively, in Odd Jobs (1991) and Due Considerations (2007).

Contents

Preface

xi

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Ted Williams 19182002

Hub Fans

Bid Kid

Adieu

John Updike on Ted Williams

Preface

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu was a five days labor of love executed and published in October 1960. For many years, especially since moving to Greater Boston, I had been drawing sustenance of cheer from Williams presence on the horizon, and I went to his last game with the open heart of a fan. The events there compelled me to become a reporter. As I hurriedly composed this account, the facts were all in me, ready to be plucked, fifteen years accumulation. When I included the piece in a 1965 collection, Assorted Prose , I added, as footnotes, some additional information not then available to me. They stand as of 1965.

At the time of its magazine acceptance, the editor of The New Yorker , William Shawn, told me, graciously, that it was the best piece about baseball they had ever printed. This was a smaller compliment than it seems. For among Harold Rosss many prejudices was one against baseball, and the magazine up to 1960 had contained few words on the subject. Thurber s excellent baseball tall tale, You Could Look It Up, had been published elsewhere. Since the sixties, of course, Roger Angell has covered the beat more amply; inexhaustibly enraptured by the action on the field, omnisciently informed about our overexpanded leagues. Angell is a baseball freak where I was just a Williams freak. But I like to think I made The New Yorker safe for the Great American Game.

The piece was admired. The late George Frazier, who often put my name in his Boston Globe compilations of people who lacked Duende , identified it as the only decent thing I d ever written. The compliment that meant most to me came from Williams himself, who through an agent invited me to write his biography. I declined the honor. I had said all I had to say, for that matter about every professional sport except golf. I did, however, write a mid-life sketch about Williams for Sport Magazine in 1986, and an obituary for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. They are abridged, conflated, and updated here under the heading Ted Williams, 19182002.