The New Yorker covers: February 26, 2018

The New Yorker isn’t Sports Illustrated, of course. But a fair number of sports, from basketball and baseball to golf and hockey, have graced the magazine's covers in one form or another since its founding in 1925.

 

Mark Ulriksen
"Slippery Slopes"

Sept. 28, 1960: Ted Williams calls it quits with a homer at Fenway

The immortal Ted Williams, a temperamental left fielder who spent 21 seasons with the Boston Red Sox, retired from major-league baseball 57 years ago today with a home run in his final at bat, which occurred at Fenway Park on Sept. 28, 1960, in a game against the Baltimore Orioles. 

There weren't a lot of fans in the stands that day, but among them was a 28-year-old John Updike, who later wrote an essay entitled Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, which The New York Times once described as “probably the most celebrated baseball essay ever.” Here’s a snippet from that essay, which appeared in the Oct. 22, 1960, issue of The New Yorker.

Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.

Essay: The Red Sox take the series . . . this one's for you, Dad

By Paul Carrier

The year my father was born in Southbridge, Mass., Fenway Park opened and the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. That was in 1912. The Sox went on to win three more titles over the next six years, but Leonide Carrier was too young back then to appreciate those triumphs.

Then the drought began.

My father was a lifelong Sox fan. So over time, he came to learn the meaning of suffering. He followed other sports and other Boston teams, but baseball was his game.

The Sox made it to the World Series in 1946, after Dad had returned home from the war, only to lose to the St. Louis Cardinals that year.

St. Louis snagged the title yet again when the two teams faced off in 1967, the year of The Impossible Dream. More disappointments followed in 1975 and 1986.

The Curse of the Bambino was a powerful thing. Its reach spanned most of the 20th century, and even beyond. The citizens of Red Sox Nation learned all there was to know about dashed hopes, and the seeming inevitability of defeat.

Dad lived a long life, but he never saw the Sox emerge on top during his teen years, or his adulthood, or his old age. He died in 2003, and when the Sox won the World Series in 2004, demolishing St. Louis in a four-game sweep, I remember thinking how sad it was that Dad just missed the payoff he and countless others had waited for, year after year after year.

Then came 2007. And now, 2013. Three championships in a decade, after all those seasonal cycles of dreams and despair. And this time around, the first World Series win at Fenway since 1918.

They say young fans, these days, are not overly surprised by such accomplishments because of the triumphs of the last decade. Dad, having been around long enough to recall the lean years and the near misses, would have displayed no such cockiness.

I wish my father could have been here last night, glued to his TV from the comfort of that plush recliner that occupied a place of honor in my parents’ living room. But they probably have even better seating where he is now.