Classics scholar Elizabeth Bobrick posted “the essay that made us friends” on her Substack newsletter today. I’m sharing the link so you’ll see how wonderful it is. Trust me: you will want to read this.
I became friends with Elizabeth Bobrick after reading this post when it first appeared more than 20 years ago. I wrote at the time about how wonderful it was (the best entry in a book of baseball essays, to my way of thinking) and Elizabeth found my commentary online. We connected, stayed friends, met in person when Andrew and Claire were on the college search, and continue to connect online on a semi-regular basis. When Elizabeth posted this earlier today on her wonderfully named Substack newsletter This Won’t End Well: On Loving Greek Tragedy, I knew I had to share it with you. I’ll provide the set up and two short examples of why you should drop what you are doing, click the link above, and read this wonderful piece. Trust me. You’ll love it.
Oedipus, Odysseus and the Baltimore Orioles
Elizabeth provides a setup that I’ll quote in full.
“The story I’m going to tell you now is about my brief life as a sports fan, when I was in graduate school, struggling to get my doctorate in Classics. Even if you’re not interested in sports, or are horrified by the ridiculous sums that top athletes are paid, or a fan of the San Antonio Spurs, stay with me. As you can see by the title of this post, there’s a connection to ancient Greek literature, and not a tenuous one.
I haven’t thought about this story in a while, but we were in New York City yesterday, where seemingly everyone was in orange and bright blue, having pledged allegiance to the Knicks. Every game has been a nail-biter, won by small numbers. We got home in time to watch them play game 5 against the San Antonio Spurs.
To the amazement of everybody, possibly to the team itself, the Knicks won. They are now the National Basketball Association champions. On the OMG/WTF scale, their victory falls somewhere between Sleeping Beauty and Lazarus. The last time they won it was in 1973, when Richard Nixon was president and nobody wore sunscreen.
The unifying feeling of exhilaration in NYC reminded me of my years as the most unlikely of sports fans. In the late 70s and early 80s, the Baltimore Orioles were my heroes when I was struggling against some tough odds. Indeed, I was trying hard not to lose what was most important to me. I wrote an essay about those days, published 20 years ago in Creative Nonfiction. Here it is.”
Oriole Magic
NOTE: Elizabeth at the time of this story is a twenty-three-year-old graduate student who fell for the Baltimore Orioles in the summer of 1979. As she notes in the beginning of the essay, much of graduate school felt very bad. Although she loved Sophocles, Plato, Homer, Virgil, the philosophers, and the historians, she did not love the endless hours of largely solitary work. Plus she was married at the time to “a brilliant and charismatic but only sporadically employed academic who treated me as if I were a freshman in his first-year philosophy seminar.”
In her first ever foray into the Sports section of the Baltimore Evening Sun (to avoid studying), Bobrick stumbles across two articles by a writer named Terry Pluto and immediately thinks of the Greek god of wealth and the underworld. Pluto had two articles in the Evening Sun that day. In the first:
Pluto had devoted this column to somebody named Jim Palmer, pitcher from the former dynasty, and the only member of the team who was nationally recognized as a star. Palmer, I read, had a chronic problem. He felt unappreciated by his manager, a dyspeptic little man named Earl Weaver. Palmer was given to sulking and saying his arm hurt, when in fact it was his ego that was sore, because Weaver didn’t let him pitch as often as he wanted to. As Pluto reported, Palmer was threatening to aggravate management until they got so sick of him that they traded him.
She writes of his second article:
“A rainstorm had forced the game (in Cleveland) to be called, and a melee ensued, during which the home fans tore up the stadium while being chased through mud by the police. Both constabulary and quarry slipped and fell a good deal. Pluto said the scene, one ‘worthy of the Keystone Kops,’ played out against a dramatic backdrop: ‘The sky was filled with lightning. The rain came down in torrents and Noah could be heard in the background pounding the last few nails into his ark.’
I had never seen reporting like this: a description of the weather apparently lifted from a Gothic novel followed by an allusion to the Book of Genesis, all in order to take a swipe at the Cleveland fans’ wild behavior and their police force’s ineptitude. I admired the boldness of the mix, and the broad brushstroke delivery.”
Later in the essay, she quotes Tom Callahan of the Washington Star, whose “sentence structure reminded me of Cicero’s.” With the O’s one game away from winning the series, Bobrick quotes Callahan and then adds her take on the sentence:
“‘Earl Weaver loudly says HE is to be the star of the Baltimore Orioles, a plain fact that amuses the players at the brink of the World Championship; which annoys them occasionally; which hurts their feelings frequently; which helped them to the brink of the championship undeniably.’ Behold, a one-sentence illustration of what adverbs can do when a professional strikes the keys.”
Now, go back and read the entire piece as Elizabeth wrote it. I’ve left out so much. Then follow Elizabeth on Substack if you want to know more about Greek tragedy.
And, oh yes, you’re welcome.
More to come . . .
DJB
Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash. Elizabeth used this photo as the lead to her Substack piece, so I’m following her example. “The Toronto Blue Jays Stadium reminds me of an ancient Greek amphitheater, so it illustrates this post nicely,” she wrote.
MORE TO COME... 