The Books: “Sportsman’s Paradise” (Nancy Lemann)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Sportsman’s Paradise by Nancy Lemann

Second novel by Nancy Lemann. Lemann does not drastically change her style from book to book – so if you find her monotonous then that would definitely be a problem. But for my taste, I LOVE every word she writes – and my only complaint is that she doesn’t publish more. Lives of the Saints came out in 1985 – I think her fourth novel came out in 2003 or 4? I guess when you write it down like that it’s not so long – but it feels that way! Again, in Sportsman’s Paradise, Lemann uses the same almost repetitive style … she keeps coming back to the same themes, and the same images (the white swans on the green pond, etc.) Images like that have meaning for her. Painful bittersweet yearning again is the main theme. The majority of the characters are Southerners (all from New Orleans – just like in Lives of the Saints) transplanted to New York. Some work in New York (like our lead) – others are up visiting. In the summers, this one group of Southerners rents what is basically a compound on the end of Long Island – all of these different cottages – and the men take the ferry into work in Manhattan, and the women stay home with all of the children (the children and their antics, and pyromania, and sweetness of character make up a huge part of the book: Lemann writes children very well). It is summer. Baseball season. Everyone is obsessed.

The lead character is a woman named Storey Collier. She is a cousin to the famous Claude Collier in Lives of the Saints. She has moved to New York because of the suggestion of a bigwig she met on the Gulf Coast – a certain Mr. Underwood – who is an absolutely HILARIOUS character. He acts like a “big cheese”. He IS a big cheese. He is strangely emotional. He begins to shout at you for no reason. But he doesn’t shout angry things, he shouts things like, “YOU ARE SUCH A WONDERFUL PERSON, GODDAMMIT.” He gets her a job at a New York newspaper. He thinks she can go far. She lives in what sounds like Spanish Harlem – with salsa playing outside her window, etc. An “old flame” of hers also works at the paper – his name is Hobby Fox (love her names). He was a professional baseball player – and now is a sportswriter. He is laconic. He pretends to be a misanthrope. Yet Storey sees in him the goodness of the ages. He is not self-pitying, even though his career in baseball was short. Perhaps as a way to be closer to Hobby (she is obviously obsessed with him – they have some sort of “past” although it takes the whole book to figure out just what exactly happened between these two) – she becomes absolutely obsessed with baseball. She lies in bed listening to her transistor radio. She loses sleep on trade nights. She can’t stand it. She is in it for the drama. You can tell she loves the sport as well, but she’s in it for the psychological truths that baseball reveals. So you can imagine how much I love this book. The way she writes about sports nuts is so right on that it makes me laugh out loud. And also the downright MANIC tragedies that occur – people choking back tears in press conferences, all of the tabloid dramas – everyone in professional sports seems to be on the verge of some kind of mental breakdown. Storey loves it all.

She spends her weekends out on Long Island, in the compound of Southerners – all of whom are wacky, insane, and memorable. There’s Margaret, a transplanted Southern belle, who wears leopard-skin bikinis and gets into all kinds of trouble. She has boating parties and gets into massive boating accidents and the Coast Guard has to be called. She adopts broken-down black jazz singers and let them stay in her house. There’s the family of 6 children – the father of which seems baffled and dominated by his own life. The wife sits on the porch of their cottage, smoking cigarettes, trying to unwind. There’s a lecherous guy named Cedric who shows up, and leers at all the women, and refuses to go home when it’s time. Everyone dreads Cedric showing up. And Mr. Underwood (who also has a cottage out there) is the feared and beloved “star” – everyone wonders when he will show up, and everyone wonders what kind of things he will shout at them – “Is Mr. Underwood coming today?” “Mr. Underwood is coming today!” Hobby Fox also takes a cottage out there – so there is a convergence of lunatic comedy every weekend … and Storey, with her vague streak of melancholy and nostalgia, tries to bear up under it all. She watches Hobby from afar. She plays with the children (you just love those kids). She gapes at Margaret and all of her debacles. She obsesses about baseball.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt.

The book makes me laugh out loud. And Lemann, with her strangely repetitive style, almost incantatory, weaves a spell over me. She really does. I’d follow her anywhere. Her last book came out 5 years ago! I’m dying!!

The irony in this book is that Storey (as you will see below) loves to obsess about what is underneath everything. She looks around and see mental crackups everywhere, and obsesses over what it all means. And her love, Hobby Fox, is laconic, dry, and appears to want everyone to think he is a misanthrope. He gently makes fun of her tortured theories about everyone’s nervous breakdowns … and she observes that there is always more to Hobby Fox than meets the eye. But they had a past. They cannot be together now. And so there is a strange yearning between them – a kindness – and all of that thwarted feeling gets poured into baseball.


EXCERPT FROM Sportsman’s Paradise by Nancy Lemann

Hobby always has the radio tuned in to baseball games, in a low masculine drone, redolent of Yankeefied spring and summer afternoons. Mr. Underwood too has a love of baseball and also keeps the games on in the office at night if he works late. Due to these influences I find that I myself am developing a growing obsession with baseball and the need to chronicle the progress of the New York team that I follow. Hobby taught me a lot about it. He doesn’t follow his old team, in Atlanta. He follow the New York team, while here. His father loved the St. Louis Cardinals, because in his day, they were the team of the South. They were an all-black team who were all extremely cultivated and they had the most beloved manager in baseball. The manager of the New York team is completely listless. The personality of the New York team mystifies me. They have a certain elegance, I think because they are so stoic. If they get a home run or something good they try not to smile or act excited. If someone gets a home run, he comes out of the dugout and gives a curtain call – tipping his hat to the crowd – seeing rather quaint or courtly – and they only do this in New York, I’m told – but maintaining a gruff though courtly exterior. Equally if they lose or get slaughtered they betray no emotion other than seeming mildly dejected. It results in a certain elegance because the other teams are more volatile and make obnoxious displays at every sign of advancement.

Also the New York team is riddled with problems. If you like problems, you’ve come to the right place, with the New York team. Each player has a dazzling array of problems. Drug problems, drug rehabilitation, alcohol detox, injuries, marital problems, personality problems, nervous breakdowns, and psychological problems, also confidence problems.

Yet at the same time as they are afflicted with a ceaseless array of problems, it is the national pastime, plain American fun, heartwarming, wholesome, one thing that draws everyone together, the very young and the very old, and has an innocence, a certain basic innocence, good for the children, etc., a chance to go forth with the heroes, a good thing for the boys.

The other thing I like about the New York team is that they are underdogs. I love that. I would never root for the favorite. I like how they are always struggling, getting slaughtered twice in one night in double-headers, being exhausted in rain delays or playing extra innings until two in the morning, losing. Adversity becomes them, as adversity can be becoming if its object has character. There is poignance in their struggle. Plus, then if they suddenly win, it is all the more affecting. The New York team always loses and is stoic, elegant, dejected. But to the stars through adversity.

Then if they suddenly win I am suffused with a sense of well-being, and if they lose I feel doleful and listless. I have a ceaseless need to listen to every single game and keep up with everyone’s problems. But my love for baseball is inexplicable – never before did I ever take the slightest interest in sports. Never was there one subject so boring to me as sports.

Now I even listen to the sports talk shows in the middle of the afternoon on the radio hosted by falling New York lunatics who remind me of Mr. Underwood, who sound off in deep Bronx and Queens accents about what burns them up. “I’ve had it,” they passionately avow, referring to sports figures who irritate them or contracts negotiated that are too expensive. Often they slip into dreamy recollections of ball players from the thirties on the Yankees team or Brooklyn Dodgers, distracted by their memories, exhibiting a marked preference for the older teams of the American League, and if someone calls them up to ask a question about upstarts in the National League they say, “I’ve had it”, etc. Sometimes they go berserk on the show and start insulting the callers and have complete breakdowns, ending up screaming out to the caller, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” and then disconnect the phone line in a fury. “You’re a schmuck. You’re crazy. You’re giving me a nervous breakdown. Shut up!” etc. Once I heard a nut call up who was equally as much of a lunatic as the announcer. The nut launched into a rambling unconnected story about a glamour girl who kissed him at a baseball game. Then he started swearing. “Do not take the name of the Lord in vain,” said the announcer solemnly to the nut. “That is where I draw the line.” It’s a funny place to suddenly draw the line, considering that he spends the rest of the time raving like some insane maniac. Then the nut started sounding off about what burned him up in sports and the announcer lost his cool again and started screaming. “You need a brain transplant. You’re driving me crazy. Shut up!” etc. etc. And these nuts got at it forty-eight hours a day. They spend forty-eight hours a day analyzing these subjects on the radio. Sports, baseball, contracts, they analyze it for forty-eight hours a day. I turn on the radio at two in the morning and there they are, talking in strange voices like they’re mentally unbalanced, analyzing everything. “New York did not play Philadelphia tonight,” the announcer will be saying in a ghostly strangled voice. “Tidewater played Philadelphia tonight. A minor-league team played Philadelphia tonight. Schmucks!” he screams in his New York parlance. This analysis had to do with one night when a lot of people on the New York team had injuries and they had to call up a lot of rookies from their farm team. I know about these things now. Suddenly I’m a sports fanatic, listening to sports talk shows twenty-four hours a day.

“Cincinnati is not going to make it. Cincinnati is through. Finished. It’s over for Cincinnati!” Screaming. Long silences. Tortured strangled voices. Here they were referring to the pennant race, and who would be in the World Series.

In New York they had a romance with failure – uncharacteristic of the North. It began in the old days, at the Polo Grounds, with a series of eccentrics as managers, and a ball club that could never win.

Everyone was in tortures over it. That’s what kills me about baseball, how everyone is in tortures over it as if it were the most serious thing that could ever be. Like the nuts who call up the sports channel on the radio all day to analyze everything. In the articles in the Tribune the Commissioner of Baseball would always have all these tortured quotes about integrity and self-delusions in long, tortured ponderings, when it is only about baseball. I mean you’d think they were talking about World War II. Like the most grave subject. The Baseball Commissioner agonizing over principles, integrity, abstractions as if he were Aristotle, not the Baseball Commissioner.

What I prefer is the team that had the romance with failure. They used to be “arrogant” and “cocky” and make obnoxious displays at every sign of advancement just like everyone else, and everyone hated them for it because they were so arrogant and cocky. Then the manager told them not to gloat or make such displays so now they all act like laconic Southern gentlemen. I personally like them better that way. But of course it’s not a New York type of attitude and the New Yorkers hate them that way. They have articles in the newspapers interviewing the players about how they feel about this and their resultant tortured ponderings – like the Baseball Commissioner agonizing over sporting matters – as they ponder their broken dreams or fond hopes or failures, in sports.

Mr. Underwood had a box at the baseball games with other big cheeses, the Governor, millionaire racetrack owners, retired bandleaders, etc. Actually the retired bandleader in his entourage was a poignant figure, somehow out of place, being Southern. He could care less about baseball. He was used to seedy dives on Bourbon Street. Baseball just wasn’t his thing. It was written on his face, in his countenance, everything about him did not say Baseball. Being from Bourbon Street, New Orleans, I can certainly understand why the Southern bandleader did not feel an affinity for baseball, as I never did before either until I realized how it has its dark side, or generally from spending five years in New York. But certainly on Bourbon Street the idea of baseball is but a remote image of a boy in the 1920s with a baseball cap in the sweet afternoon sun or sterling Northern twilight in some halcyon idea of America, from which New Orleans is indescribably remote. But Mr. Underwood loved it all – retired sports figures, troubled prizefighters, washed-up Southern bandleaders – in his box of big cheeses at the game.

Hobby had a more ambivalent attitude, having played in the Major Leagues himself, and there were times when I got the feeling that he had left his heart there. Being thirty-six and out of practice I doubt he could go back. Though I hear of players who are forty-two and forty-three, such as relief pitchers. I guess he did not play long enough or make enough of an impression to come back in a career in baseball as a coach or manager. He listened to the games but did not often speak of his past in it. Also he had been a newspaperman now for too many years to think of much else. But once I saw in his room in Orient the Louisville Slugger that he used in Atlanta, for it was inscribed with the team and had his name burned onto it. He kept it with him, then. Some reminder of an innocence, which baseball surely represents, although it certainly has its dark side, so it seems to me at least. As every time I ask him about one of the players he always launches into a long story about how the fellow was a drug addict, or on trial, or just got out of alcohol detox or jail. I had no idea that baseball had such a dark side, or was so riddled with problems, but, of course, that’s what I like about it.

He was telling me about a pitcher who thought it was his day off and took LSD. He happened to hear on the radio that his team was playing that night in Chicago – which he had forgotten. So he hopped on a plane to Chicago tripping on LSD and pitched a no-hitter.

Later he was on trial and told the judge that when you’re on LSD in a ball game, it makes the ball look like a grapefruit when it’s coming at you so it’s easier to hit.

Also Hobby told me that on his team in Atlanta it was one of the first years that they had a sports psychiatrist for the ball club. He went crazy at the end of the season.

The TV announcers discuss these problems during their ceaseless banter at the game even though they are so All-American it seems they wouldn’t want to admit it, and were all players themselves before they became announcers. The other night New York was playing Philadelphia and the announcers were discussing the pitcher for Philadelphia before the game. One of the announcers is a kindly old man who seems at times virtually senile and can’t seem to keep track of what is going on. You’d think that maybe baseball in his day had less problems to it, at least in terms of psychiatry. But they were talking about the pitcher and he said, “Frank is back on the mound right now but it seems last year he had some psychological problems,” looking out at ten million viewers on TV. Then he chuckled fondly, after saying the word “psychological problems,” shaking his head in bemusement, but at the same time with concern, and then got a sort of rueful, whimsical smile, looking at the other announcer to elaborate.

“I was talking to him and he explained, ‘I was giving myself a nervous breakdown.’ Ha ha. He went to Harvard but he just got out of alcohol detox. He’s a great pitcher, Bob. The only question is, can he keep out of hootch.”

Keep out of the hootch – I’m not sure whether that means stay out of the looney bin – or whether it means stay off the sauce.

Harvard, alcohol detox, baseball, and psychological problems – you have to admit that’s a pretty weird mix-up.

There was a rain delay and they called in a sort of sports weatherman. He was a cornball. The announcers are always sentimental and enthusiastic.

“What about the weather, Jim? Do you think we’ll play?”

“I know we will, Bob. In about forty-five minutes, you’ll see this storm clear up and they will start the ball game.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“This is my life, Bob. I’m obsessed with the weather. I love it. It’s my life.”

Then the announcers chuckle and shake their heads fondly in bemusement.

On certain Fridays since this April Hobby had been taking me to the baseball games, when he could get away from the office.

Friday night we went to a double-header. The stadium announcer keeps droning on throughout the game on a loudspeaker in a cheerful voice, “Alcoholic beverages … Anti-social behavior … People drinking … Taking drugs …” admonishing potential abusers of these vices. There are a lot of police. Sometimes horrifying brawls break out in the stands. “Here comes trouble,” said a fan when a weirdo with a menacing expression came up to take his seat and the weirdo heard him and got mad. “Shut up! Who are you calling trouble, schmuck, shut up. Shut up!” etc. As everyone knows, the attitude of the New York fans is “What have you done for me lately?” Meaning if the team is losing the fans are filled with loathing and disgust – this is why they call the radio talk shows at two in the morning to ceaselessly analyze all the problems and complain about how disgusted they are and go berserk etc. The New York stadium is like a latent catastrophe waiting to happen. But it never really does, in baseball. An innocence is inexorably attached to the game no matter how many people go crazy or how many drug problems or etc. arise.

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