Loving a Kahn Game

Not doing something I should have done years ago left me an unimaginable present for the Coronavirus pandemic. For decades I’ve been moving from home to home a used copy of Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer, knowing I had to read it as a lover of baseball and words. I mean, I grew up during the golden age of the other famous Roger baseball writer, Roger Angell, who turned 100 this September. As a non-sophisticated teenager in the Jersey burbs, I had no use for the New Yorker, but still read and re-read all of Angell’s collections, even, perhaps getting a sense of the elegiac at an early age from the one titled Late Innings in 1982. Perversely, not reading Roger Kahn became almost easier to do the longer I didn’t do it. I could carelessly toss it off as something lightweight like the Don Henley hit that shares its name.

As with so many of the things we know we must love—art, family, the pro team you’ve rooted for since childhood—it’s easy to dart and dodge and avoid doing the thing too much of the world says we must. Or, in this case, I perhaps mistrusted the browning, slightly mildewing pages across the top of my Kahn first edition hardback, as if the book had its own sickness.

Finally, summarily handed the extra time I assumed there’d never be along with the gaping baseball void of a season that didn’t begin until late July, The Boys of Summer suddenly seemed necessary. I required baseball, if even ancient games. The book’s elevator summation would be “one-time Brooklyn Dodger beat writer decides to look up the old team a decade after most of the players retired,” but that’s why marketing fails to grasp art’s heart. For what Kahn pulls off is something much more complex—his own fascinating memoir, a father-son tale tartly told, an aching look at what the fight for integration took out of those who made that struggle, and a stare-down with time, the opponent sure to strike out even the most adroit athlete. Kahn, a writer’s writer, after all, nicked his title from Dylan Thomas. His English teacher mother should be proud. And it surely means something that the full line of the poem goes: “I see the boys of summer in their ruin.”

And while Welshman Thomas, probably not much a baseball fan, was dead before the Brooklyn Dodgers finally won their one World Series, Kahn was off the Dodger beat by 1955, too. “You may glory in a team triumphant,” Kahn insists in his book’s preface, “but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thoughts, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.”

Of course, at last getting around to reading a book published in 1972 only piles up the ‘leaving its’—Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Herald Tribune where Kahn’s stories ran, all the players written about both heroically and simply as suffering humans (Pee Wee and Jackie, The Duke and Campy). All gone. There’s even bitter recognition: of all places, Kahn conducted his interview with the out-of-baseball Carl Furillo while working for Ironworkers Local 580, installing elevators in the World Trade Center Twin Towers. Kahn himself is gone, dying just February 2020 before the whole world got up and sick. Somehow, even baseball left. The games have returned, yet the parks lack fans, haunted by audio playback of crowds that had come before.

Still, Kahn makes clear so much life was lived—quick wrists twitched at fastballs, off-duty writers downed highballs at Toots Shor’s, words as rich as transpontine and viduity graced the page. So many fathers playing catch with sons, quiet and saying so much. Sure it’s just a game.

George Yatchisin, ever hopeful Mets fan and inveterate fantasy baseball player, is the Director of Communications for the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the chapbook Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and the full length The First Night We Thought the World Would End (Brandenburg Press 2019). As a journalist he has worked for outlets like KCET Food Blog, Sunset, Santa Barbara Independent, and Edible Santa Barbara. His work also appears in the anthology I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Nonfiction from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (University of Chicago Press 2015). Yatchisin has an MFA and MA/W from the University of Iowa and a MA from the Johns Hopkins University. For more, you visit his website georgeeats.com or follow him @gyatchisin

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