CHAPTER 14

It was while Hodges was at the plate that the inner voice, which had been mumbling inaudibly at first, and calmly, began to get out of control. On the pitcher’s mound one was conscious not of the hum of the crowd or even, closer at hand, the encouragement of the infielders. What you remembered was this voice chattering away within your head, offering comfort, encouragement, advice. I was acutely aware of this separation of mind and body: the mind seemed situated in a sort of observation booth high above the physical self, which, clumsy and ill equipped in these unnatural surroundings, took on the aspect of an untrustworthy machine—a complicated cranelike bipedal mechanism sporting two jointed appendages, one of which with a rusty creak of rarely used parts was supposed to hurl a horsehide spheroid 60 feet 6 inches with accuracy. That was the function of the physical plant, and high above, peering down like a skeptical foreman, the mental self offered a steady commentary which reflected how well the machine was doing.

I don’t pretend there is anything remarkable about this dichotomous condition. Such mumbling is familiar to all of us. During the 1958 World Series television gave the country a remarkable opportunity to watch a ballplayer talking to himself, often the telescopic lenses bringing you so close to him that you felt you were going to overhear him. He was the Milwaukee pitcher Lew Burdette, the big West Virginian from an explosives center called Nitro. In those television close-ups you’d see his mouth working as he chatted to himself out there on the pitcher’s mound, and while there were some skeptics who took him to be simply at work churning up the wherewithal for his controversial spitball, it was obvious, at least, that if he was preparing such a mixture to treat the ball he was talking to himself at the same time.

Not long after the Series, and my own experience in Yankee Stadium, I wrote Burdette a brief letter—asking him if in the interests of a magazine article he would disclose what he says to himself on the pitcher’s mound. I enclosed a self-addressed envelope, stamped and all, just as we did back when we wrote away for autographs, and sent it to the Braves’ office in Milwaukee. Something must have gone wrong. Some weeks later a reply came—but not actually a reply since what I took out of the envelope on a cold winter’s day was a single sheet of paper with six or seven Braves’ autographs on it. I’m not even sure (having lost the paper since) that Burdette’s name was among them.

Often I imagine that my letter was forwarded properly and that Burdette got it, and sat down and took considerable pains to answer the request, but that somehow he tucked his reply in the wrong envelope. And then I think of the recipient—a youngster in Appleton, Wisconsin, say, just finishing his first year in Little League, baseball his passion, and writing away to his hero, Burdette, for his autograph, and any of his teammates’ if it wasn’t too much bother, and then blocking in a few painfully wrought sentences of how he was dreaming of pitching one day in County Stadium, and working on his control and all… and how weeks later the reply came—the three-page typewritten letter signed by the great Burdette himself and starting off politely: “Thank you for your interest in what I say to myself…” and how the boy had walked along the cold country road trying to read it, puzzling over the long words like “self-criticism” and “provocation” and the short ones such as “id” and “ego,” and how he’d taken it to bed with him and looked at it under the covers with a flashlight, learning nothing, not quite sure he oughtn’t to show it to a higher authority, his parents perhaps, and even, frankly, a little worried now about his association with Little League.

There have been other chattering pitchers (it seems a habit restricted to that position)—Tommy Byrne for one. He was a tall, stooped figure who toiled for the Yankees in the early fifties—a more voluble talker, even, than Burdette. Sometimes you could hear him all over the park, not so much talking to himself as offering a general running commentary to anyone within earshot: his infielders, the batter, the crowd. Often, if a batter listened carefully, he’d hear Byrne say, “Gonna throw you a hook, mistah,” and sometimes he’d get one and sometimes he wouldn’t. The ballplayers had a fine name for Byrne. “The Broadcaster” they called him, and Casey Stengel, whose own famous brand of talk invariably seems an extension of the subconscious, was so genuinely fond of him that he kept him around much longer than his ability called for. There are others: Ed Plank, the great procrastinator, a fidgeter who took so long staring in at the plate that a batter’s eyes would water waiting for the pitch to come down, who before beginning his motion would further dismay the batter by discussing him audibly: Easy man. No hit. One down, two to go. Nobody hits. More recently Jim Brosnan, the bespectacled relief pitcher who refers to the inner voice as Silent Screaming in his valuable chronicle The Long Season, occasionally erupts vocally: Ils ne passeront pas, he is said to have mumbled at a startled batter.

In any athletic contest we urge ourselves on in some fashion of this sort or other. In rare cases, the inner voice actually takes on a physical form. Arthur Larsen, the national tennis champion in 1950, believed he was being advised and cajoled throughout a match by a large eagle that perched on his shoulder. Larsen had a habit that one remarked on if one saw him play enough—a slight twist of the head just before he served… as if he was trying to rid himself of a crick in the neck. What he was doing was turning his head so the eagle could speak more directly into his ear. I assume his imaginary eagle took off when the point started and hovered above the court, taking reconnaissance during play, to swoop down when the point was over and spill what it had learned in Larsen’s ear.

My own voice never took on a guise as esoteric as that of an eagle. It had no form; it just chatted away from limbo as normally as it could under the circumstances. During the first moments on the pitcher’s mound, as Richie Ashburn set himself at the plate, it occupied itself with the general urging to “calm down and take it easy”—but you felt the hypocrisy nonetheless… the hysteria lurking close at the edge of the voice, like a hyena beyond the firelight, and the mouth was very dry.

After the astonishing success with Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays, their high flies both caught in the infield, the voice became almost uncontrollable with delight. In its pleasure at the machine under observation it cried out to it “How t’go, bébé!” and “Boy, you kid!” and also there bounced around within my head such strange effusive exclamations as “Gol-ding it!” and “Gee-zus!” and when the grin tried to spread across the face it was in reaction to this close harmony between body and spirit.

So successful was the machine during its early operation that for a while the inner voice took scant notice that quickly thereafter the machine’s performance began to suffer. After the debacle of the curve thrown to Frank Robinson, high over his head and almost up the screen behind home plate, and the subsequent line-drive double, the inner voice still remained chipper and confident—booming phrases back and forth within the skull as hearty as late-afternoon conversation in the locker room of a golf club. “You doin’ just fine, heah? Just fine,” it would say—for mysterious reasons of its own with a Southern inflection. It wasn’t until Ernie Banks’s extended presence at the plate that the voice’s tone became somewhat more shrill and panicky. Still, it remained under control. It offered advice: “Y’all pushing the ball, bo,” it would say. “Don’t push the ball like that, all stiff-like… easy does it, bo,” and then quite often during the windup it would say: “OK now Mistah Banks, y’all gonna swing at this pitch, you heah? OK? Now heah she comes, please m’boy, swing at it, SWING AT IT… Oh chrissake, hey, what’s wrong with y’all, Mistah Banks, can’t y’all see?” this last in a high whine as Elston Howard would retrieve the ball from the dust where he’d blocked it and whip it back.

It was during Banks’s tenure that the inner voice refused to stay contained within the head. The lips began to move and my mumbled voice became increasingly audible on that lonely hill, mooning and squeaking like the fluttery breath of a tuckered hound.

“Lookit that thing go on out theah!” it gasped when Banks had finally gone, and Frank Thomas’s long home run started for the depths of the upper deck. “Lawd Almighty!”

The voice still wasn’t strained with gloom, however, or even edgy following that tremendous blow; it was assessing the situation, and while there was awe in its tone and breathlessness, along with that strange Southern cracker inflection, it was a sturdy voice, and it would have been hard to guess that within four minutes or so that same voice would crack under the strain.

What caused it to crack was a string of seven balls I threw to Gil Hodges before he hit three fouls in a row and then his single, none of these first pitches close enough to the plate to get him to so much as twitch the bat off his shoulder. At first the voice offered its usual counsel not to push the ball and to take things easy; presently it got exasperated—“Hey, come on now, bear down, Ah say”—like a short-tempered farmer training a pup to come to heel; then finally, as the control continued to flag, the panic surged in not by degrees but coming quickly, like a prowler’s bulk suddenly filling a doorway, and it came in and throttled the voice so that all that came out was a thin high squeak.

And then this curious thing happened. It turned traitor. The voice went defeatist on me. It escaped and ran off, washing its hands of the whole miserable business. But it didn’t desert me completely. Much worse, it capered around out there on the periphery—jeering and catcalling. “You fat fool!” it would call out, not concerned that the object of its raillery was splinter-thin, and, with the sweat pouring off, getting thinner. “You po’ fat fool… y’think y’all pretty fat and smart standing out theah pitching, hey? Well, lemme tell yo’ sumpin. Y’all can’t pitch yo’ way out of a paper bag, that’s what. Jes’ try. Jes’ le’s see yo’ try putting the ball ovah the plate.”

So I would try—and when the ball missed the strike zone under Hodges’s watchful eye, the voice would cackle gleefully: “Y’all see that? Oh my! Y’all see that ball roll in the dust? Ladies an’ gen’men, d’yall observe that ball drop down theah in the dirt. Haw! Haw! Haw!” it would roar gustily in my head. “Haw! Haw! Haw!”

Afterward I thought about that bellowing turncoat voice, bewildered by it, and ashamed until for a while I decided that its traitorous conduct was just another way of blowing off steam. After all, in moments of severe stress the voice often lets go like a wayward rocket. In many European sports it’s not considered indecorous to explode—particularly in the Latin countries where a player’s emotional state at such times will range from the quiet sobbing of the pelota player, his basket drooped like a broken wing, leaning his head against the stone wall of the court and bewailing his errors, to the tumultuous demonstrations of the soccer player who will often hurl himself to the ground, kick, and snatch at tufts of grass with his teeth.

It isn’t only the Latins. I know a Westchester commuter who plays squash in a New York athletic club with a grim, voluble ferocity which reaches its peak when in his crisis of frustration he lets loose a throbbing scream of anguish—usually after missing a shot, but sometimes, as I say, just to let the pressure go—a lash of sound that beats on the ear like a wall of surf, jolting the players in the other courts to jump as if seawater boiled at their ankles, and then that wash of noise booms into the dressing room where in the cubicles they grin and say, “Well, ol’ Larry’s really lettin’ loose today… the Screamer must be taking a shellacking,” and pours down the wide carpeted stairs to inundate the leather armchairs below, and the smoking stands, and the backgammon tables, and the tall clocks with the great pendulums that move slowly as the rock of an ocean liner, and in the distant library the old men stir from their sleep and blink under the pale thin sheets of the Wall Street Journal drawn up over their heads, and on a good clear day, with Larry in full throat, that wave of sound reaches three floors down to the ground level below and the thin tatters of it curl out into the street like wisps of scud.

Perhaps that voice of mine, cavorting on the distant sidelines, yelling its scorn through cupped hands, was a manifestation of this sort—as meaningless and harmless as my friend’s high-pitched anguish. I thought so for a while. But then a month later I changed my mind. I found out that if your faculties don’t stay around to help you, it simply means you’re inadequate to the task, running from it shamefully. I was playing bridge with three great experts as part of my proposed series for Sports Illustrated; my partner was Oswald Jacoby, a gruff, big, round-shouldered genius with small pudgy hands that hold his cards in sloppy clumps which he scowls at from a face twisting in the agues and tics of concentration, his brain—legend has it—one of those that cracked the Japanese naval code… and this man, my partner, a grim competitor, was so outraged at a bad mistake of mine that he rose up from his chair, heavily, like a broaching whale, and shouted among other things: “What-did-you-do-that-for? Why? Why? Why?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know when I looked up and saw Jacoby rearing up from the other side of the table as big in his rage as a cliff. My whole mental being fled before him like a frightened crow. This time the voice didn’t even stay around to jeer. It offered the slightest sound: “Donno,” it said, as forlorn as the cry of a bird in a petrified forest, and then it got out and kept on going. It never stopped, and just as it had been in the stadium, the physical self was left to face the music alone, disembodied and empty of mind, nothing for it to do but pluck feebly along the edge of the card table with its fingers.