Sunday Scribblings: I Rooted for the Giants: A Look at Shakespeare's Comedies

This week's Sunday Scribbling prompt is rooted.

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When I was a boy, Dad rooted for the N.Y. Yankees. I'm not sure why. He loved Mickey Mantle, maybe because legend had it that when Mantle got called up to play in New York he arrived with a cardboard suitcase and an Oklahoma way of doing things. Being a small town Kellogg guy, maybe Dad felt like he and Mickey Mantle were rooted in a similar way: beer drinking, late nights, uncomplicated world view, love of sports.

I parted ways with my father in 1962. I rooted for the San Francisco Giants. My hero was Willie Mays. Mays and I could not have been different in how our lives were rooted. I found Mays electrifying. He was an acrobatic player, powerful, fast, agile, and dramatic.

I began rooting for the Giants in 1962. They played the Yankees in the 1962 World Series. Dad rooted for the Yankees. He seemed more than disappointed in me. He was repulsed. Wasn't I like him, rooted in Yankee lore and love? Why, at the age of eight, had I betrayed him? Why did I become a fan not only of the Giants, but of the National League?

I can't explain it very well. All I know is that with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, with Matty Alou on third and Willie Mays on second, Willie McCovey tatooed a line drive off of Ralph Terry that Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman, played perfectly and speared. The Yankees won.

I was heartbroken. My baseball rooting became rooted in heartbreak. The Giants would not return to the World Series until 1989, a Series shattered by the earthquake of that year. My sports fan life became rooted in rooting for the underdog.

Somehow, then, in my twenties, having rooted for underdog sports teams led to my love of Shakespeare being rooted in the comedies.

I began to realize, first of all, that most fellow students and professors thought of the comedies as inferior to the tragedies. They were the underdog plays to me.

As I studied the comedies more, I realized they were about timelessness, about time going on forever. They ended in marriage; marriage promised procreation. The comedies promised continuation. They often took place in a green world where miracles and reconciliation and forgiveness occurred, making the marriages and continuation possible. In the green world, time seemed to stand still. We were in a world made real by dreams and wishes and imagination.

In my twenties, my thinking was more rooted in baseball than Shakespeare. The two met. Time in baseball is not rooted in clock time. It's measured in outs. If no outs occur, the game continues for ever. Like in the comedies, where forgiveness and marriage bring characters to a place of security within themselves, bring them home, baseball is rooted in players leaving home and returning again.

Baseball is a green game, played on pastures that became enclosed by stadiums. I experienced baseball as a game of miracles, unexpected twists of fate. I understood comedy because of how my thinking was rooted in baseball.

Toward the end of his life, my father no longer rooted for the Yankees. They became too corporate, no longer a green world team, but a team of the city. By the time he died, we had come to reconcile ourselves to each other. I no longer rooted for the Giants, but even if I did, I think we both knew that our relationship was rooted in something much deeper than what baseball team each of us rooted for.

(I don't know why "comments" is disabled on this post. If you'd like to comment, email me: billy1227@gmail.com)

The 1964 World Serious

October 1964
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In 1964, all the World Series games were still played during the day. Many, many people were more serious about the World Series than about their day jobs. My dad always called the World Series the World Serious. I think that's why.

I don't know why I didn't have school on October 15, 1964. Maybe it was one of those days when our teachers had meetings in Coeur d'Alene. Moreover, I don't know why my dad was off that day. It wasn't like him to dump a shift at work. But, maybe, in order to watch the seventh game of the 1964 World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals with me, he skipped work.

Maybe Dad felt like he owed me one.

He and I had been in a heated battle over this World Series. Dad loved the Yankees. He loved Micky Mantle. His other favorite was Yogi Berra. In 1964, Berra managed the Yankees and Mantle was in the dusk of his career.

I had gone my own way. I became a National League fan in 1962 out of heartbreak. In the 1962 World Series, when the Giants' Willie McCovey, his team down 1-0, two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, Felipe Alou on third and Willie Mays on second, smashed a screaming line drive into the desperate, spearing glove of the Yankees' second baseman, Bobby Richardson, it ended the seventh game of the 1962 World Series and my love affair with the Giants began. So did my love for the National League. So did my life-long love affair with baseball bridesmaids, second place teams, perennial losers, and underdogs.

As the 1964 World Series opened, Dad and I laid down a World Serious wager. I took this bet very world seriously. It was as if my Christmas gifts or whether I'd get to play Little League or whether I could put my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Denlinger on the trading block hung in the balance. I sorely, desperately wanted to beat my dad, even if the bet was only for a quarter.

He knew this.

Dad was confident the Yankees would win. He baited me, teased me, introduced me to the world of Silver Valley smack talk. After Mickey Mantle homered in the bottom of the ninth off knuckleballer Barney Schultz to beat the Cardinals in Game 3, I picked a throw rug off the living room floor and slapped the television. Dad siezed the moment. He went to Don Rinaldi's market on Mullan Street and made a taunting poster out of butcher paper and wax marker mocking the pitching efforts of Schultz. One problem: his poster called Schultz "Willie the Knuck" instead of "Barney the Knuck" and after I quit bawling, I taunted my dad back for his error and our World Serious war momentarily melted into roaring laughter.

After Dad made me cry with this poster, I thought I'd show him how tough I was. I went to the Public Library and checked out a biography of Yogi Berra. When the Yankees won Game 6 and dad started giving me the business, I opened the book to show him I could take it. The moment got lost, though. I was crying so hard at being teased, I couldn't read the words through my tears.

"Son, come on. You don't need to do that," Dad said, an air of new respect in his voice. I was determined, though, and continued to try to read the Yogi book, my throat sore from crying.

For Game 7, Dad took me to his favorite soda fountain and bar, Joe and Henry's (later to become Dick and Floyd's). Joe and Henry's was Yankee central. Sports pictures covered the wall opposite the bar, including one of Henry posing with Joe DiMaggio when DiMaggio had spoken at a sports banquet in Coeur d' Alene or Spokane. Dick Costa, the bartender, like many of his customers, was Italian, and the Italians in Kellogg felt like blood brothers with the great Italian Yankess: DiMaggio, Rizutto, Berra, and others.

I was in the enemy's lair.

Dad asked Dick if I could watch the game in the bar. Dick went to the back of the establishment and found a wood Pepsi crate and placed in on his side of the bar below the television. I was out of sight of any policemen or liquor board inspectors who might stroll in that afternoon. I had to crane my neck to look up at the television, but I got to watch the game without sitting at the bar. Dad bought me a hot dog and all the root beer I could drink.

The battle between Dad and me died. We had such a great time watching Game 7 that when the Cardinals, behind the power pitching of Bob Gibson and the hitting of Ken Boyer and Lou Brock, built a six run lead by the fifth inning and held on to win, 7-5, the smack talk was over and we left the bar together the closest to peers we had ever been.

Our days in Joe and Henry's/Dick and Floyd's had just begun. But that day, watching Game 7, settling our bet, putting down the verbal swords and the emotional machetes, sharing the company of Dad's friends on his turf, made the 1964 World Series the most memorable of many memorable World Series to come.