BOOKISH

               Six weeks into our confinement and, unhappily, the end looks about as far away it was when we began. The news is grindingly repetitious and except for that nonevent the NFL Draft nothing much has been happening in sports. Deprived of the present we must retreat into the past with entertainments like ESPN’s many-part rehash of the 1998 Chicago Bulls’ championship season. I was around for that, and while as a Chicagoan I cheered the Bulls, as a reporter I was obliged to keep some distance. That became easier after watching the internal squabbles of that great basketball team, reminding us that except for their otherworldly skills our sports idols are human.

               The nice thing about the past is that there is plenty of it, always permitting our further exploration. This led again to my wonderful sports library, collected largely from freebies accumulated in my years as a columnist and book reviewer. The 500-odd volumes that line my office walls look more impressive than they should because I haven’t read nearly all of them. A plus about these trying times is that they’ve allowed me to do some catching up.

               One book that I previously only scanned is “PROPHET OF THE SANDLOTS;  JOURNEYS OF A MAJOR LEAGUE SCOUT,” by Mark Winegardner, published in 1990.  It’s a record of a year’s travel by the author with Tony Lucadello, a former minor-league infielder who was a 46-year scout (1943-89) with, first, the Chicago Cubs and then the Philadelphia Phillies. In that span he signed 52 future major-leaguers, including the Hall of Famers Mike Schmidt and Fergie Jenkins. The number would be 53 if it included Ernie Banks; the scout wouldn’t count him because the future Mr. Cub was a young pro in the Negro leagues when he first saw him, but Banks always credited Lucadello with bringing his star to light.

               The book is a look at baseball as it was, not is. Lucadello made his rounds of the Midwestern high school, American Legion and college fields without the radar gun or stopwatch no scout would be without in the current, data-driven age. He prided himself on being a “projector,” someone who could foretell how the teenagers he watched would look three to five years hence, when they were of age to aspire to the Bigs.

 To say that Lucadello went his own way would be an understatement. He was a loner, keeping to himself on the Motel 6-Denny’s circuit baseball scouts still travel. He was a bit of a secret agent, too, the better to keep his evaluations from opposition eyes. One thing he didn’t keep secret was his tenet, uttered only partly in jest, that 87% of baseball was played below the waist. By that he meant that the hips, legs and feet are what generate the power, speed and balance that made major leaguers.  He looked for youngsters who might be puppies in high school but full-grown German Shepherds down the road.  His observations on the game are as pertinent now as they were when the book was written 30 years ago.

               “SECOND WIND; THE MEMOIRS OF AN OPINIONATED MAN,” is an unusual kind of jockography, first because its subject is the star basketball center Bill Russell, an unusual kind of athlete, and its coauthor is Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose intellectual credentials are a cut above the sort of writers who usually write such works. Published in 1979, when Russell was 45 years old (he’s 86 now), it contains a lot of  forgettable material about the games he played but some truly fascinating stuff about his early life and later struggles with celebrity that all great athletes face but rarely address, in print or, probably, with themselves.

               Russell’s perspective was unique, partly because, unlike the big majority of his NBA peers, he wasn’t a growing-up-entitled natural athlete but a self-made one. A gangly, clumsy teen in Oakland, California, he was the 15-and-a-half man on a 15-man jayvee team in high school, splitting the team’s 15^th and last uniform, and the scant playing time that went with, with another student. He made the varsity as a junior off his height and jumping ability, but wasn’t all-anything, and got his hoops scholarship to the University of San Francisco (his only offer) by virtue of his performance on a summer-league team that he made by accident. At USF, with teammate and long-time cohort K.C. Jones, he painstakingly built the defensive and offensive moves that fueled his epic career.

              Russell had a prickly personality; he eschewed giving autographs and receiving honors, even insisting that his jersey-retirement ceremony with the Boston Celtics be held in an empty Boston Garden with only ex-teammates present. He reminded strongly of another Boston sports idol, the baseball great Ted Williams, who was portrayed in a memorable John Updike New Yorker piece as a perfectionist “quixotically desiring to sever [his] game from the paid spectatorship and publicity that surrounds it.”

Russell resisted being defined by his sport, considering fans’ cheers as hypocritical and ultimately destructive to his self-image. “I’ve tried to handle my ego the way I would any other part of my character: to acknowledge it but not let it control me or make me into something I don’t like,” he wrote. The man-against-himself theme, rare in sports, makes this book worthwhile.

 A little levity is especially valuable these days and there’s that aplenty in “GOLF DREAMS” by the aforementioned John Updike. Published in 1996, it contains 30 pieces on the sport by the late, world-class man of letters. Updike was a champion writer but a so-so golfer, an 18-handicapper (I once read). Indeed, he was living proof of the adage that one never will be good at any game one takes up as an adult.

 Like most duffers, Updike is both torn and fascinated by the fact that a gloriously perfect shot or two can transform any ordinary round, pulling the golfer back to the links despite abundant evidence that his time might be better spent elsewhere. “Golf is not a hobby… hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue,” he writes. Rather, it’s a “trip” that can “so transforms one’s somatic sense” that it can “debunk the fabric of mundane reality.” 

A couple of pieces alone make the book worthwhile. “Drinking from a Cup Made Cinchy” mocks golf instruction by comparing tea-drinking mechanics with those of the golf swing. In “Farrell’s Caddy,” a fictional player follows the muttered advice of a boozy, taciturn Scottish bag-toter to leave his wife and back off from a business merger as well as transform his swing.  There’s a good trifecta if there ever was one.