It was May 1978. I was just days away from completing my sophomore year of college and I was wrapping up my first full season as the University of Kansas sports correspondent for the Kansas City Star newspaper.
Certain moments mark time in our travels through life and our journey down a career path. In the world of journalism and newspapers – especially in this crazy profession known as sportswriting – there are thrills so special that they become ingrained in your memory forever. Home runs and buzzer beaters, record-breaking performances and championships are all unforgettable.
But so are the people you meet along the way.
Inspiration can come from a handshake, a conversation, an interview, or a pleasant exchange of thoughts and ideas. On this day in May of 1978 all those things took place – but the memory I’ve forever carried with me came from an autographed book, signed by a true icon in our business.
On this day, I sat in the chancellor’s residence at KU and interviewed Roger Angell, generally considered the best baseball writer in America over the past 50 years. Saturday in Cooperstown, N.Y., at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Angell received the J.G Taylor Spink Award, which annually honors a member of the print media.
Congratulations Mr. Angell. The honor was long overdue.
Roger Angell delivering his speech in Cooperstown. (MLB Network)
Angell, now 93, deserved a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame in the 1980s, after churning out one after another of his baseball “companions.” For a full perspective on what Angell has meant to baseball and his literary impact of the game, you must read the piece by Tom Verducci in the July 21, 2014 issue of Sports Illustrated.
“What he does with words, even today at 93, is what Mays did in centerfield and what Koufax did on the mound,” Verducci writes. “His superior elegance and skill are obvious even to the untrained eye.”
The memory of that 1978 interview is well preserved, thanks to the inscription on the inside front page of an Angell book titled Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion.
The message is short but so meaningful to a young writer still dreaming about his career.
“For Ken Davis – With best wishes – and good luck in the world of baseball and other sports. – Roger Angell 5/2/1978”
The good fortune of this interview, which combined my passion for baseball and for writing, came my way thanks to an English course on baseball in literature. The class has been taught off and on since 1974 by James Carothers, an English professor who also taught both of my sons during their days at KU. Carothers is one of those teachers you never forget, one of my all-time favorites who went out of his way to make this an entertaining and educating course.
Some in the KU English Department scoffed at the class. But Carothers, who also has taught Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Hemingway, found a way to make it work.
“It became a sociological event,” Carothers once said.
Carothers lured Angell to the campus in Lawrence, Kan., as an extension of the course. Angell held a reading of his own work at the Kansas Union, an event that was well attended and priceless for those who treasured Angell’s lyrical impressions of the game.
One of my favorite passages in “Five Seasons” came from the 1975 World Series when Angell described Carlton Fisk’s epic home run that won Game Six.
“I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw – Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body,” Angell wrote.
Suddenly he was remembering his “old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends” in New England – from places like Brookline, Mass. and Brooklin, Maine; Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway, Damarisotta, Pomfret, Connecticut, and Promfret, Vermont, in both Concords and all five Manchesters. I knew nothing of those places at that time, but Angell helped me imagine the towns and the celebrations. Little did I know that just seven years in the future I would be living in New England and covering sports for the Hartford Courant. In my second year at the Courant, I would be part of our coverage of another history-making World Series between the Red Sox and Mets.
In 1986, the Red Sox would break their fans’ hearts again in another Game Seven. Angell covered that World Series too, writing from the perspective of a fan – as he always has.
Angell wrote: “I will root and suffer for the Sox and the Mets next summer and the summers after that, and if they ever come up against each other again in the World Series – well, who knows? Ask me again in a hundred and sixty-seven years.”
No one else ever wrote about baseball that way. Angell was the only one. He was the first New York baseball writer (certainly not the last) that I ever met. But he was totally unique. Angell became the 64th writer to win the annual Spink Award but he is the first never to have been a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Angell wrote for The New Yorker, one of the most fascinating and well-written magazines in our country. But The New Yorker does not cover baseball as a beat; it just features those marvelous essays about the game, written by Angell and later pulled together into collections known as books.
I remember rushing to the newsstand for years and years, just to grab a copy of that New Yorker that would feature Angell’s season ending essay. Nothing could be better. It was the same type of journey you would make to the record store when your favorite group released a new album. But Angell’s essays let you hold on to an entire season of memories, from Boston to Seattle, from San Francisco to New York – and everywhere in between.
I no longer remember the exact direction of that interview, where it began or where it ended. But I do know we talked about baseball, baseball players, baseball managers, his favorite moments, his writing style, The New Yorker, his mother (who was the magazine’s first fiction editor) and his stepfather (E.B. White, who wrote Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, and revised The Elements of Style – a must on the bookshelf of any writer).
In his collection of baseball stories known as Late Innings, Angell’s description of the classic swing of George Brett – my all-time favorite player – occupies most of one page (pg. 296 in the hardcover edition). There is another passage that examines the hard-suffering Kansas City fans and their devotion to their teams, the Blues, the A’s and the Royals.
Angell wrote of Arthur Bryant’s Restaurant, ribs and baseball and frosty pitchers of beer with Jim (Carothers, my English teacher), Dana (Leibengood, a faculty member at the KU School of Journalism), and a free-lance writer named Bill (Bill James, then known as the author of the Baseball Abstract). Talk about touching close to my home – Angell brought these people to life through his writings and introduced them to baseball’s nation.
I still have bookmarks inserted for the description of Brett and the dialogue between those baseball friends who lived for the game and also called my school their place of work. When I need a quick trip back to a simpler time, when enjoying life as a baseball fan was my greatest joy, those bookmarks allow me to reach out to Roger Angell in the quickest fashion.
Saturday’s ceremony was held at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown. (MLB Network)
It’s hard to believe that interview took place 36 years ago. For a young writer, nothing could have been more inspirational. Two years later I covered my first American League playoff game (Yankees-Royals) and my first World Series game (Phillies-Royals). George Brett was there. So were Jim, Dana, Bill and Roger.
I never once tried to imitate the writings of Roger Angell. It would have been fruitless and silly. No one could do that. But I always admired him and loved reading his poetic essays.
Angell is a one-of-a-kind writer. Maybe the very best baseball ever had.
We thank him for the masterpieces he wrote for The New Yorker, and all the books that remain on the bookshelf in my home office with prominent placement. And we congratulate him on his magnificent honor. Now his work will live on forever in that magical New York village known as Cooperstown.
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