Armchair Archaeologist

(written on July 2nd, 2010)

這是一個微妙的時機, 讓以下這些和巴薩, 加泰隆尼亞和西班牙
相關的事實和現象同時發生, 也促成了我寫下這篇文字的動機.

如果它們閱讀起來無甚條理, 或許是因為解釋現實世界中這三者
的糾葛本來就是件極其困難的任務.

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當 Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol, Pique, Busguets, Pedro, Victor Valdes
和 David Villa 代表西班牙隊在世界盃擊敗葡萄牙挺進八強的同時，
諷刺的是，他們所效力的巴塞隆納與加泰隆尼亞地區，卻遭受了政治上
的嚴重挫敗。

經過超過四年的糾葛，六月 28 日和 29 日，西班牙的憲法法庭
（Tribunal Constitucional）終於對 2006 年新修訂並通過實施的
加泰隆尼亞自治法（Estatut d'Autonomia de Catalunya de 2006）
作出裁決。

儘管憲法法庭裁定通過了其中超過 95% 的法條（其中包括: 由於歷史
和文化因素，加泰隆尼亞可繼續使用「國家(nacion)」這個詞來稱呼
自己，即使這個字眼在目前的西班牙憲法中不具任何效力，加泰隆尼亞
這個自治政體，也仍屬西班牙不可分割的一部份），卻刪除了其中 14 條
最關鍵的條文，並「改寫」另外 27 條。

被刪除的 14 條當中，最具代表意義的是以下這段，原自治法條文中
第 6.1 條，開宗明義對於加泰隆尼亞語（Catalan）的釋義：

http://www.gencat.cat/generalitat/eng/estatut/titol_preliminar.htm#a6

"Catalonia's own language is Catalan. As such, Catalan is the language
of normal and preferential use in Public Administration bodies and in
the public media of Catalonia, and is also the language of normal use
for teaching and learning in the education system."

「加泰隆尼亞語為加泰隆尼亞之母語。因此，加泰隆尼亞語為加泰隆尼亞
『一般(normal)』且『優先(preferente)』於政府機關與大眾媒體使用之
語言文字，同時為學校教育一般使用之語言文字。」

憲法法庭裁決，以上這段文字和西班牙憲法中載明西班牙語為「唯一官方文字」
的立場相衝突，因而違憲。

其他遭憲法法庭否決的條文，主要遭剝奪的權力在於司法（包括加泰隆尼亞
地區這幾年逐步培養的自治法院和陪審團等機構）和稅收自主權方面。

在憲法法院的裁決終於出爐之後，加泰隆尼亞地區一片嘩然之聲，
現任自治政府最高首長主席 Jose Montilla 強調，憲法法院應當尊重
加泰隆尼亞自治法之整體性，不可任意裁決刪除部份條文。他呼籲所有
自治區人民起而抗爭，並且已經決定，將於今年七月十日，聯合自治區
各商會和社團機構，舉辦大規模的罷工示威遊行活動。

加泰隆尼亞地區六大主要政黨其中的四大: 集中統一聯合黨（暫譯）
(Convergncia i Uni, CiU)、加泰隆尼亞社會黨（暫譯）
(Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya, PSC)、
加泰隆尼亞共和左傾黨（暫譯）(Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, ERC)、
與加泰隆尼亞綠黨（暫譯） (Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds, ICV) ，
平時對各政治議題立場大相逕庭，現在合計佔加泰隆尼亞議會八成席次的他們
卻決定組成聯合陣線，準備在西班牙國會提案，企圖提出憲法法院的裁決無效之訴。

看到這裡，一定會有人會問，為何加泰隆尼亞要對西班牙憲法法院的裁決
如此群情激憤？尤其在自治法當中超過 95% 的條文都獲得通過的情況下？

這個問題的原因，除了之前所提，自治法當中遭刪除的部份包括了語言、司法
和稅收等攸關加泰隆尼亞自主發展的關鍵部份外，另一個重要的原因，在於
這部自治法被送上憲法法院釋憲過程之荒謬。

2006 年六月，在先後經過加泰隆尼亞和西班牙國會多數通過之後, 加泰隆尼亞
自治法得以舉行公民投票, 並獲得 73.24% 的選票支持, 順利通過
(儘管這次自治法公投, 創下了有史以來投票率首度低於五成 (48.85%) 的紀錄) ,
並在同年八月交付執行.

然而, 在加泰隆尼亞和西班牙國會表決階段, 都對此一自治法投下反對票的西班牙
人民黨 (Partido Popular, PP, 西班牙國會目前最大的反對黨, 立場中間偏右,
保守主義) , 提案將自治法當中的 125 條交付憲法法庭裁決. 在西班牙憲法法庭的
大法官成員已經超過六年沒有正常改選的情況下 (諷刺的是, 當時阻擋憲法法庭改選
成員的最有力力量, 正是西班牙人民黨), 由這個憲法法庭作出的裁決,
會引起加泰隆尼亞絕大部分民眾的憤怒, 也就不難想像了.

對於已經因經濟問題焦頭爛額的西班牙總理 JosLuis Rodrguez Zapatero 來說,
加泰隆尼亞和西班牙在這個時候再起爭端, 絕對是他最不願意看見的事情.
目前最新的消息是, 他已經承諾將盡快與自治區政府主席 Jose Montilla 見面,
尋求解決目前爭端, 滿足大多數人民預期的方式.

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看完以上這段新聞提要, 許多人一定會問, 這些政治上的紛擾, 和 FC Barcelona
有什麼關係?

這個問題的答案, 難以用三言兩語解釋.

如果說, 在甫卸任的巴薩主席 Joan Laporta 帶領下, 巴薩獲得了隊史以來
競技上最大的成功, 絕不是一句誇大之辭: 兩座歐冠, 四座聯賽冠軍,
國王盃冠軍, 世俱盃冠軍, 和其他大大小小的獎盃...

然而, Laporta 的功績並不止於此. 在他任內, 巴薩勇於擁抱全球化的浪潮,
不只是一支 "加泰隆尼亞人的軍隊". 巴薩同時用傲人的成績和正面的形象宣傳
(尤其是與 UNICEF 的合作), 讓球迷數目在世界各地迅速增加, 成為全世界商業
收益前幾名的球隊. 在穩定成長的商業收益下, 球隊的經濟狀況, 也比 2003 年
Laporta 接任時, 有了長足的進步和改善.

簡而言之, Laporta 的功業, 絕對會讓他的繼任者備感壓力, 因為目前這支球隊
已經站在隊史上前所未有的高峰.

但是, 在巨大的功績底下, Laporta 的個人形象一直備受爭議. 除了擅於利用
媒體的敢言作風之外, Laporta 更是個不折不扣的加泰隆尼亞獨立運動支持者.
不只一次, Laporta 都公開表示過對加泰隆尼亞獨立的支持; 儘管讓巴薩成為
全球球迷人數最多的球隊之一, 但 Laporta 也不只一次公開表示, 巴薩過去,
現在和未來, 都將是加泰隆尼亞人最重要的象徵.

儘管 Laporta 勇於表達個人政治立場的作風, 近年來不斷遭受來自馬德里方面
和他的競爭對手的批評, 指責他以巴薩主席的身分, 把這支球隊當作散播個人
政治立場的工具, 但 Laporta 帶領下球隊的成就, 又讓這些指責和雜音缺乏力道.

種種跡象更顯示, 熱衷政治的 Laporta, 在卸下巴薩主席的身分後, 即將投入
加泰隆尼亞的政治圈. 過去一年來, 不斷有各種猜測, Laporta 將會加入
分離主義政黨之一的 ERC, 投身今年秋天的加泰隆尼亞國會大選; Laporta
家喻戶曉的公眾形象, 和擔任巴薩主席的成就, 讓他成為每個政黨都想拉攏的
對象.

結果, Laporta 再度令所有人大吃一驚. 剛卸下巴薩主席的他, 已經立刻決定
將成立一個新的政黨: 加泰隆尼亞民主黨 (暫譯) (Democracia Catalana, DC) .

Laporta 將代表這個積極支持獨立運動的政黨
(口號: Som una nacio (We are a nation)), 出征今年秋天的國會大選.

儘管 Laporta 和 DC 未來的組織, 計畫和動向, 要等到明後天正式記者會後
才會更加明朗, 但考慮 Laporta 至今累積的人脈和聲望, 和他在巴薩主席任內
所展現出的處事手腕, DC 對於加泰隆尼亞, 乃至於西班牙政治未來的影響, 都是
不可小覷的. 憲法法庭裁決加泰隆尼亞自治法違憲, 導致民情激憤的事件,
更有可能成為讓 Laporta 政治生涯起飛的最大助力.

儘管 Laporta 離開了巴薩, 但他未來可能在不同的位置上, 帶給這支球隊
和加泰隆尼亞更大的影響.

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Sandro Rosell 以破紀錄的得票率 (61.35%) 當選新任主席的事實, 除了說明了
他的競爭對手都太過彆腳之外, 也象徵著有不在少數的會員已經厭煩 Laporta
體制中的某些特徵: 政治體育不分, 作風獨裁, 用人唯親...

然而, Rosell 上任後, 除了必須馬上對於前任主席留下的球員轉會僵局
(Ibra, Yaya, Juan Mata...) 作出決定之外, 他對於加泰隆尼亞政治的態度,
更是一個值得觀察的課題. 他能否保持 (到目前為止) 目前保守謹慎低調少言
的舉止? 從過去的言行看來, 令人很難有太高的信心.

更重要的是, 儘管 Rosell 在競選期間選擇對許多重要議題都模糊以對,
不提出具體的意見, 但他未來對於會員 (Socio) 的政策傾向 -

將對外國籍會員人數作出限制, 加泰隆尼亞籍的會員將享有比西班牙籍和其他國籍
的會員享有更高的權力 -

除了點出了 Rosell 也是個投機主義者 (當然, 2003 年宣傳將簽下 Beckham 的
Laporta 也是), 而這也是一種譁眾取寵騙取選票的招式之外, 更令人擔心的是,
這種極端強調加泰隆尼亞正統性的思惟, 是否只是一種針對 Laporta 帶領下巴薩
擁抱全球化政策的反動, 但卻將讓這支球隊走上另一條封閉, 更具排外主義的道路?
這是另一個需要觀察的重點.

一個新時代即將到來. 巴薩會員們 (絕大多數是加泰隆尼亞籍) 作出了選擇.
但這個選擇將會由全球的巴薩球迷們共同承擔.

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回到西班牙隊和巴薩的問題. 沒有人能否認的是, 2010 的西班牙國家隊,
不只擁有史上最多人數的巴薩球員, 巴薩球員佔據了前中後場三線的骨幹,
踢的更是巴薩控球在腳, 中場傳導的球風 (最新一個這樣講的人, 是葡萄牙
總教練 Carlos Queiroz).

歷史上, 西班牙國家隊從來沒有這麼依賴過巴薩的球員和戰術體系
(以前是聞所未聞, 難以想像的) ; 而這支西班牙的成功與失敗,
也將直接與巴薩球員的表現相關.

然而, 在自治法釋憲判決出爐, 加泰隆尼亞醞釀大規模抗爭的這個時機,
巴薩球員 - 尤其是曾踢過加泰隆尼亞代表隊的 Puyol, Xavi 等球員 -
在西班牙隊當中的心境勢必是十分微妙的.

微妙的原因, 不只因為身為加泰隆尼亞人卻替西班牙隊效力的事實 -
儘管這是台灣主流不求甚解, 習慣簡化現實環境的皇馬球迷最簡單貼上的
標籤, 儘管這可能只佔極小一部分 - 更重要的原因是, 這些加泰隆尼亞
球員對於加泰隆尼亞和西班牙兩個政治實體都擁有高度認同, 並且渴望
替西班牙爭取榮譽的事實.

不只是西班牙需要加泰隆尼亞 - 以奪冠提振民心士氣, 讓目前極度蕭條的經濟現況
注入一記強心針.

加泰隆尼亞也需要西班牙 - 加入西班牙隊讓球員獲得在世界舞台上發揮,
贏得世界盃冠軍, 加強自我意識的機會.

這兩種認同之間同時存在, 互相衝突卻又能在某種情感基礎上取得和諧.
這種現象在 2008 年歐錦賽上已經出現, 但在今年世界盃上顯著到令人難以忽略.
對我而言, 這種雙重認同是觀察今年的西班牙隊場上表現之外最感興趣的部分.

從某種角度來看, 今年的西班牙隊 (加泰隆尼亞勢力佔據越來越重要的地位)
或許也是目前西班牙處境的縮影.

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無論你喜愛與否, FC Barcelona 的誕生, 成長與茁壯, 和加泰隆尼亞
地區 / 國家的政治發展密不可分, 是不爭的事實.

漠視政治和歷史存在的球迷, 終究無法理解球隊精神的來源, 以致於
對於球隊的感情無法深入.

而在目前這個加泰隆尼亞和西班牙政治和體育正巧互相露出糾纏痕跡的時機,
希望能有更多球迷起而關注這兩者之間過去的歷史和目前的關係, 而不至於
把巴薩, 加泰隆尼亞, 西班牙和皇馬之間的關係流於一廂情願的二元論述.

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Sat in front of my desk dully after running aimlessly in a rainy and gloomy Sunday morning. Turn on the old guilty pleasure eventually and trying to recall those times when I am all alone, traveling and having fun with myself near the center of the universe. And what else is able to lift your spirit immediately than hearing Underworld chanting "You bring lights in..." with raucous IBIZA crowds in the background?

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John: So, you came here to tell me that even if I can’t walk I can still hear the birds sing? Enjoy the rainbow, and feeling the sun shine on my face?

House: Those things are fun. Okay, life sucks. Your life sucks more than most. It’s not as bad as some, which is depressing all by itself. But do me a favor. Just let me find out what’s wrong with you. And if you still want to kill yourself, I’ll give you a hand. That sound fair?

John: Yeah, sure. I’ll stick around to indulge your obsession. It’s over. I lost my air. The session the other night, with those kids? That was a test to see if I could still play. I can’t.

House: And that’s all you are? A musician?

John: I got one thing, same as you.

House: Really? Apparently, you know me better than I know you.

John: I know that limp. I know the empty ring finger. And that obsessive nature of yours, that’s a big secret. You don’t risk jail and your career just to save somebody who doesn’t want to be saved unless you got something, anything, one thing. The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever. That’s because they don’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. I got music, you got this. The thing you think about all the time, the thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else. No woman waiting at home after work with the drink and the kiss, that ain’t gonna happen for us.

House: That’s why God made microwaves.

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I like it that I am not even going to take any time and review it. It's just so lovely messy as I wanted: Instant happiness is the only goal at the moment.

Another tiny thing to vent. Job sucks, more than a few colleagues are self-acclaimed smart-asses that I can do nothing but only laugh at for the most of time. Wish they stay as pathetic as they are.

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When a bomb falling onto a shit hole, with the deafening crescendo,
every maggot is ripped out, wriggling in awe, screaming, and pointing
finger at each other.

This is Taiwan, my inseparable homeland.

This so-called "national pastime" and its environment is rooted in
an unholy ground. It sucked in 1968, it sucked in 1984, it sucked in
1992, and it sucked in 2009.

The majority of people here either are too naive to see it or too
sophisticated not to manipulate it for their own merit.

Either way, the collective excitement and anger toward baseball has
been so hopelessly cheap, that I do not even disdain to shed a tear.
The only proper act is a sardonic laugh.

You are not going to understand the system until you are into THE
system. And you will not care about everything, including the system
itself, after you are into it. All you are trying to do, then,
is to survive.

Being an unwanted, unwelcomed survivor, the only thing I am able to do,
is to keep the eyes open and witness it get even worse, before, if
very fortunately, it has any chance to get better.

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New Yorker (October 22, 1960)



Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’s last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. “WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sex owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17–4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, “You maaaade me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it . . .”

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may he termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch when the young bridegroom came out of the West, announced “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ” The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, hat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams’ public relations. The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams’ ease the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren’t there. Seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters—but he has held to it from his rookie year on. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941. He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams’ valedictory, in a column by Hock Finnegan in the Boston American (no sentimentalist, Huck):

Williams’ career, in contrast [to Babe Ruth’s] has been a series of failures except for his averages. He flopped in the only World Series he ever played in (1946) when he batted only .200. He flopped in the playoff game with Cleveland in 1948. He flopped in the final game of the 1949 season with the pennant hinging on the outcome (Yanks 5, Sox 3). He flopped in 1950 when he returned to the lineup after a two-month absence and ruined the morale of a club that seemed pennant-bound under Steve O’Neill. It has always been Williams’ records first, the team second, and the Sox non-winning record is proof enough of that.

There are answers to all this, of course. The fatal weakness of the great Sox slugging teams was not-quite-good-enough pitching rather than Williams’ failure to hit a home run every time he came to bat. Again, Williams’ depressing effect on his teammates has never been proved. Despite ample coaching to the contrary, most insisted that they liked him. He has been generous with advice to any player who asked for it. In an increasingly combative baseball atmosphere, he continued to duck beanballs docilely. With umpires he was gracious to a fault. This courtesy itself annoyed his critics, whom there was no pleasing. And against the ten crucial games (the seven World Series games with the St. Louis Cardinals, the 1948 playoff with the Cleveland Indians, and the two-game series with the Yankees at the end of the 1949 season, winning either one of which would have given the Red Sox the pennant) that make up the Achilles’ heel of Williams’ record, a mass of statistics can be set showing that day in and day out he was no slouch in the clutch. The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.

Whatever residue of truth remains of the Finnegan charge those of us who love Williams must transmute as best we can, in our own personal crucibles. My personal memories of Williams begin when I was a boy in Pennsylvania, with two last-place teams in Philadelphia to keep me company. For me, “W’ms, lf” was a figment of the box scores who always seemed to be going 3-for-5. He radiated, from afar, the hard blue glow of high purpose. I remember listening over the radio to the All-Star Game of 1946, in which Williams hit two singles and two home runs, the second one off a Rip Sewell “blooper” pitch; it was like hitting a balloon out of the park. I remember watching one of his home runs from the bleachers of Shibe Park; it went over the first baseman’s head and rose meticulously along a straight line and was still rising when it cleared the fence. The trajectory seemed qualitatively different from anything anyone else might hit. For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism. This brittle and temperamental player developed an unexpected quality of persistence. He was always coming back—back from Korea, back from a broken collarbone, a shattered elbow, a bruised heel, back from drastic bouts of flu and ptomaine poisoning. Hardly a season went by without some enfeebling mishap, yet he always came back, and always looked like himself. The delicate mechanism of timing and power seemed locked, shockproof, in some case outside his body. In addition to injuries, there were a heavily publicized divorce, and the usual storms with the press, and the Williams Shift—the maneuver, custom-built by Lou Boudreau, of the Cleveland Indians, whereby three infielders were concentrated on the right side of the infield, where a left-handed pull hitter like Williams generally hits the ball. Williams could easily have learned to punch singles through the vacancy on his left and fattened his average hugely. This was what Ty Cobb, the Einstein of average, told him to do. But the game had changed since Cobb; Williams believed that his value to the club and to the game was as a slugger, so he went on pulling the ball, trying to blast it through three men, and paid the price of perhaps fifteen points of lifetime average. Like Ruth before him, he bought the occasional home run at the cost of many directed singles—a calculated sacrifice certainly not, in the case of a hitter as average—minded as Williams, entirely selfish.

After a prime so harassed and hobbled, William was granted by the relenting fates a golden twilight. He became at the end of his career perhaps the best old hitter of the century. The dividing line came between the 1956 and the 1957 seasons. In September of the first year, he and Mickey Mantle were contending for the batting championship. Both were hitting around .350, and there was no one else near them. The season ended with a three-game series between the Yankees and the Sox, and, living in New York then, I went up to the Stadium. Williams was slightly shy of the four hundred at-bats needed to qualify; the fear was expressed that the Yankee pitchers would walk him to protect Mantle. Instead, they pitched to him—a wise decision. He looked terrible at the plate, tired and discouraged and unconvincing. He never looked very good to me in the Stadium. (Last week, in Life, Williams, a sportswriter himself now, wrote gloomily of the Stadium, “There’s the bigness of it. There are those high stands and all those people smoking—and, of course, the shadows. . . . It takes at least one series to get accustomed to the Stadium and even then you’re not sure.”) The final outcome in 1956 was Mantle .353, Williams .345.

The next year, I moved from New York to New England, and it made all the difference. For in September of 1957, in the same situation, the story was reversed. Mantle finally hit .365; it was the best season of his career. But Williams, though sick and old, had run away from him. A bout of flu had laid him low in September. He emerged from his cave in the Hotel Somerset haggard but irresistible; he hit four successive pinch-hit home runs. “I feel terrible,” he confessed, “but every time I take a swing at the ball it goes out of the park.” He ended the season with thirty-eight home runs and an average of .388, the highest in either league since his own .406, and, coming from a decrepit man of thirty-nine, an even more supernal figure. With eight or so of the “leg hits” that a younger man would have beaten out, it would have been .400. And the next year, Williams, who in 1949 and 1953 had lost batting championships by decimal whiskers to George Kell and Mickey Vernon, sneaked in behind his teammate Pete Runnels and filched his sixth title, a bargain at .328.

In 1959, it seemed all over. The dinosaur thrashed around in the .200 swamp for the first half of the season, and was even benched (“rested,” Manager Mike Higgins tactfully said). Old foes like the late Bill Cunningham began to offer batting tips. Cunningham thought Williams was jiggling his elbows; in truth, Williams’ neck was so stiff he could hardly turn his head to look at the pitcher. When he swung, it looked like a Calder mobile with one thread cut; it reminded you that since 1953 Williams’ shoulders had been wired together. A solicitous pall settled over the sports pages. In the two decades since Williams had come to Boston, his status had imperceptibly shifted from that of a naughty prodigy to that of a municipal monument. As his shadow in the record books lengthened, the Red Sox teams around him declined, and the entire American League seemed to be losing life and color to the National. The inconsistency of the new superstars—Mantle, Colavito, and Kaline—served to make Williams appear all the more singular. And off the field, his private philanthropy—in particular, his zealous chairmanship of the Jimmy Fund, a charity for children with cancer—gave him a civic presence somewhat like that of Richard Cardinal Cushing. In religion, Williams appears to he a humanist, and a selective one at that, but he and the Cardinal, when their good works intersect and they appear in the public eye together, make a handsome and heartening pair.

Humiliated by his ’59 season, Williams determined, once more, to come back. I, as a specimen Williams partisan, was both glad and fearful. All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in? He looked like a ghost in spring training. Manager Jurges warned us ahead of time that if Williams didn’t come through he would be benched, just like anybody else. As it turned out, it was Jurges who was benched. Williams entered the 1960 season needing eight home runs to have a lifetime total of 500; after one time at bat in Washington, he needed seven. For a stretch, he was hitting a home run every second game that he played. He passed Lou Gehrig’s lifetime total, then the number 500, then Mel Ott’s total, and finished with 521, thirteen behind Jimmy Foxx, who alone stands between Williams and Babe Ruth’s unapproachable 714. The summer was a statistician’s picnic. His two-thousandth walk came and went, his eighteen-hundredth run batted in, his sixteenth All-Star Game. At one point, he hit a home run off a pitcher, Don Lee, off whose father, Thornton Lee, he had hit a home run a generation before. The only comparable season for a forty-two-year-old man was Ty Cobb’s in 1928. Cobb batted .323 and hit one homer. Williams batted .316 but hit twenty-nine homers.

In sum, though generally conceded to be the greatest hitter of his era, he did not establish himself as “the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Cobb, for average, and Ruth, for power, remain supreme. Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, Joe Jackson, and Lefty O’Doul, among players since 1900, have higher lifetime averages than Williams’ .344. Unlike Foxx, Gehrig, Hack Wilson, Hank Greenberg, and Ralph Kiner, Williams never came close to matching Babe Ruth’s season home-run total of sixty. In the list of major-league batting records, not one is held by Williams. He is second in walks drawn, third in home runs, fifth in lifetime averages, sixth in runs batted in, eighth in runs scored and in total bases, fourteenth in doubles, and thirtieth in hits. But if we allow him merely average seasons for the four-plus seasons he lost to two wars, and add another season for the months he lost to injuries, we get a man who in all the power totals would be second, and not a very distant second, to Ruth. And if we further allow that these years would have been not merely average but prime years, if we allow for all the months when Williams was playing in sub-par condition, if we permit his early and later years in baseball to be some sort of index of what the middle years could have been, if we give him a right-field fence that is not, like Fenway’s, one of the most distant in the league, and if—the least excusable “if”—we imagine him condescending to outsmart the Williams Shift, we can defensibly assemble, like a colossus induced from the sizable fragments that do remain, a statistical figure not incommensurate with his grandiose ambition. From the statistics that are on the books, a good case can be made that in the combination of power and average Williams is first; nobody else ranks so high in both categories. Finally, there is the witness of the eyes; men whose memories go hack to Shoeless Joe Jackson—another unlucky natural—rank him and Williams together as the best-looking hitters they have seen. It was for our last look that ten thousand of us had come.

Two girls, one of them with pert buckteeth and eyes as black as vest buttons, the other with white skin and flesh-colored hair, like an underdeveloped photograph of a redhead, came and sat on my right. On my other side was one of those frowning, chestless young-old men who can frequently be seen, often wearing sailor hats, attending ball games alone. He did not once open his program but instead tapped it, rolled up, on his knee as he gave the game his disconsolate attention. A young lady, with freckles and a depressed, dainty nose that by an optical illusion seemed to thrust her lips forward for a kiss, sauntered down into the box seats and with striking aplomb took a seat right behind the roof of the Oriole dugout. She wore a blue coat with a Northeastern University emblem sewed to it. The girls beside me took it into their heads that this was Williams’ daughter. She looked too old to me, and why would she be sitting behind the visitors’ dugout? On the other hand, from the way she sat there, staring at the sky and French-inhaling, she clearly was somebody. Other fans came and eclipsed her from view. The crowd looked less like a weekday ballpark crowd than like the folks you might find in Yellowstone National Park, or emerging from automobiles at the top of scenic Mount Mansfield. There were a lot of competitively well-dressed couples of tourist age, and not a few babes in arms. A row of five seats in front of me was abruptly filled with a woman and four children, the youngest of them two years old, if that. Someday, presumably, he could tell his grandchildren that he saw Williams play. Along with these tots and second-honeymooners, there were Harvard freshmen, giving off that peculiar nervous glow created when a quantity of insouciance is saturated with insecurity; thick-necked Army officers with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices; pepperings of priests; perfumed bouquets of Roxbury Fabian fans; shiny salesmen from Albany and Fall River; and those gray, hoarse men—taxidrivers, slaughterers, and bartenders who will continue to click through the turnstiles long after everyone else has deserted to television and tramporamas. Behind me, two young male voices blossomed, cracking a joke about God’s five proofs that Thomas Aquinas exists—typical Boston College levity.

The batting cage was trundled away. The Orioles fluttered to the sidelines. Diagonally across the field, by the Red Sox dugout, a cluster of men in overcoats were festering like maggots. I could see a splinter of white uniform, and Williams’ head, held at a self-deprecating and evasive tilt. Williams’ conversational stance is that of a six-foot-three-inch man under a six-foot ceiling. He moved away to the patter of flash bulbs, and began playing catch with a young Negro outfielder named Willie Tasby. His arm, never very powerful, had grown lax with the years, and his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. To catch the ball, he flicked his glove hand onto his left shoulder (he batted left but threw right, as every schoolboy ought to know) and let the ball plop into it comically. This catch session with Tasby was the only time all afternoon I saw him grin.

A tight little flock of human sparrows who, from the lambent and pampered pink of their faces, could only have been Boston politicians moved toward the plate. The loudspeakers mammothly coughed as someone huffed on the microphone. The ceremonies began. Curt Gowdy, the Red Sox radio and television announcer, who sounds like everybody’s brother-in-law, delivered a brief sermon, taking the two words “pride” and “champion” as his text. It began, “Twenty-one years ago, a skinny kid from San Diego, California . . .” and ended, “I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him.” Robert Tibolt, chairman of the board of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, presented Williams with a big Paul Revere silver bowl. Harry Carlson, a member of the sports committee of the Boston Chamber, gave him a plaque, whose inscription he did not read in its entirety, out of deference to Williams’ distaste for this sort of fuss. Mayor Collins presented the Jimmy Fund with a thousand-dollar check.

Then the occasion himself stooped to the microphone, and his voice sounded, after the others, very Californian; it seemed to be coming, excellently amplified, from a great distance, adolescently young and as smooth as a butternut. His thanks for the gifts had not died from our ears before he glided, as if helplessly, into “In spite of all the terrible things that have been said about me by the maestros of the keyboard up there . . .” He glanced up at the press rows suspended above home plate. (All the Boston reporters, incidentally, reported the phrase as “knights of the keyboard,” but I heard it as “maestros” and prefer it that way.) The crowd tittered, appalled. A frightful vision flashed upon me, of the press gallery pelting Williams with erasers, of Williams clambering up the foul screen to slug journalists, of a riot, of Mayor Collins being crushed. “. . . And they were terrible things,” Williams insisted, with level melancholy, into the mike. “I’d like to forget them, but I can’t.” He paused, swallowed his memories, and went on, “I want to say that my years in Boston have been the greatest thing in my life.” The crowd, like an immense sail going limp in a change of wind, sighed with relief. Taking all the parts himself, Williams then acted out a vivacious little morality drama in which an imaginary tempter came to him at the beginning of his career and said, “Ted, you can play anywhere you like.” Leaping nimbly into the role of his younger self (who in biographical actuality had yearned to be a Yankee), Williams gallantly chose Boston over all the other cities, and told us that Tom Yawkey was the greatest owner in baseball and we were the greatest fans. We applauded ourselves heartily. The umpire came out and dusted the plate The voice of doom announced over the loudspeakers that after Williams’ retirement his uniform number, 9, would be permanently retired—the first time the Red Sox had so honored a player. We cheered. The national anthem was played. We cheered. The game began.

Williams was third in the batting order, so he came up in the bottom of the first inning, and Steve Barber, a young pitcher who was not yet born when Williams began playing for the Red Sox, offered him four pitches, at all of which he disdained to swing, since none of them were within the strike zone. This demonstrated simultaneously that Williams’ eyes were razor-sharp and that Barber’s control wasn’t. Shortly, the bases were full, with Williams on second. “Oh, I hope he gets held up at third! That would be wonderful,” the girl beside me moaned, and, sure enough, the man at bat walked and Williams was delivered into our foreground. He struck the pose of Donatello’s David, the third-base bag being Goliath’s head. Fiddling with his cap, swapping small talk with the Oriole third baseman (who seemed delighted to have him drop in), swinging his arms with a sort of prancing nervousness, he looked fine—flexible, hard, and not unbecomingly substantial through the middle. The long neck, the small head, the knickers whose cuffs were worn down near his ankles—all these points, often observed by caricaturists, were visible in the flesh.

One of the collegiate voices behind me said, “He looks old, doesn’t he, old; big deep wrinkles in his face . . .”

“Yeah,” the other voice said, “but he looks like an old hawk, doesn’t he?”

With each pitch, Williams danced down the baseline, waving his arms and stirring dust, ponderous but menacing, like an attacking goose. It occurred to about a dozen humorists at once to shout “Steal home! Go, go!” Williams’ speed afoot was never legendary. Lou Clinton, a young Sox outfielder, hit a fairly deep fly to center field. Williams tagged up and ran home. As he slid across the plate, the ball, thrown with unusual heft by Jackie Brandt, the Oriole center fielder, hit him on the back.

“Boy, he was really loafing, wasn’t he?” one of the boys behind me said.

“It’s cold,” the other explained. “He doesn’t play well when it’s cold. He likes heat. He’s a hedonist.”

The run that Williams scored was the second and last of the inning. Gus Triandos, of the Orioles, quickly evened the score by plunking a home run over the handy left-field wall. Williams, who had had this wall at his back for twenty years, played the ball flawlessly. He didn’t budge. He just stood there, in the center of the little patch of grass that his patient footsteps had worn brown, and, limp with lack of interest, watched the ball pass overhead. It was not a very interesting game. Mike Higgins, the Red Sox manager, with nothing to lose, had restricted his major-league players to the left-field line—along with Williams, Frank Malzone, a first-rate third baseman, played the game—and had peopled the rest of the terrain with unpredictable youngsters fresh, or not so fresh, off the farms. Other than Williams’ recurrent appearances at the plate, the maladresse of the Sox infield was the sole focus of suspense; the second baseman turned every grounder into a juggling act, while the shortstop did a breathtaking impersonation of an open window. With this sort of assistance, the Orioles wheedled their way into a 4–2 lead. They had early replaced Barber with another young pitcher, Jack Fisher. Fortunately (as it turned out), Fisher is no cutie; he is willing to burn the ball through the strike zone, and inning after inning this tactic punctured Higgins’ string of test balloons.

Whenever Williams appeared at the plate—pounding the dirt from his cleats, gouging a pit in the batter’s box with his left foot, wringing resin out of the bat handle with his vehement grip, switching the stick at the pitcher with an electric ferocity—it was like having a familiar Leonardo appear in a shuffle of Saturday Evening Post covers. This man, you realized—and here, perhaps, was the difference, greater than the difference in gifts—really intended to hit the ball. In the third inning, he hoisted a high fly to deep center. In the fifth, we thought he had it; he smacked the ball hard and high into the heart of his power zone, but the deep right field in Fenway and the heavy air and a casual east wind defeated him. The ball died. Al Pilarcik leaned his back against the big “380” painted on the right-field wall and caught it. On another day, in another park, it would have been gone. (After the game, Williams said, “I didn’t think I could hit one any harder than that. The conditions weren’t good.”)

The afternoon grew so glowering that in the sixth inning the arc lights were turned on—always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession. Aided by the gloom, Fisher was slicing through the Sox rookies, and Williams did not come to bat in the seventh. He was second up in the eighth. This was almost certainly his last time to come to the plate in Fenway Park, and instead of merely cheering, as we had at his three previous appearances, we stood, all of us—stood and applauded. Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark? Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together in continuous succession like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand. It was a sombre and considered tumult. There was not a boo in it. It seemed to renew itself out of a shifting set of memories as the kid, the Marine, the veteran of feuds and failures and injuries, the friend of children, and the enduring old pro evolved down the bright tunnel of twenty-one summers toward this moment. At last, the umpire signalled for Fisher to pitch; with the other players, he had been frozen in position. Only Williams had moved during the ovation, switching his hat impatiently, ignoring everything except his cherished task. Fisher wound up, and the applause sank into a hush.

Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.

Fisher, after his unsettling wait, was wide with the first pitch. He put the second one over, and Williams swung mightily and missed. The crowd grunted, seeing that classic swing, so long and smooth and quick, exposed, naked in its failure. Fisher threw the third time, Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.

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.

Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams’ miracle. Fisher continued to pitch, and escaped further harm. At the end of the inning, Higgins sent Williams out to his leftfield position, then instantly replaced him with Carrol Hardy, so we had a long last look at Williams as he ran out there and then back, his uniform jogging, his eyes steadfast on the ground. It was nice, and we were grateful, but it left a funny taste.

One of the scholasticists behind me said, “Let’s go. We’ve seen everything. I don’t want to spoil it.” This seemed a sound aesthetic decision. Williams’ last word had been so exquisitely chosen, such a perfect fusion of expectation, intention, and execution, that already it felt a little unreal in my head, and I wanted to get out before the castle collapsed. But the game, though played by clumsy midgets under the feeble glow of the arc lights, began to tug at my attention, and I loitered in the runway until it was over. Williams’ homer had, quite incidentally, made the score 4–3. In the bottom of the ninth inning, with one out, Marlin Coughtry, the second-base juggler, singled. Vic Wertz, pinchhitting, doubled off the left-field wall, Coughtry advancing to third. Pumpsie Green walked, to load the bases. Willie Tasby hit a double-play ball to the third baseman, but in making the pivot throw Billy Klaus, an ex-Red Sox infielder, reverted to form and threw the ball past the first baseman and into the Red Sox dugout. The Sox won, 5–4. On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams had decided not to accompany the team to New York. So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing. Quit.

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and always a vital inspiration.

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Surprisingly, grown up I was never a Celtics fan. Far away from it. In contrary to the ultimately dominant Celtics led by Larry, I appreciated the 76ers and Rockets much more, which was resemble to my character to always root for the underdogs, in the 80s' during my childhood while I could only watched recorded NBA game weekly. In the 90's like everyone I was a Michael's fan. Then it's my lifelong relationship with the Kings starting from 1999. The support to Celtics more came from that of Redsox and my friendship with vantora.

The affection toward this No.17 team gradually grew during the season. You can tell the team spirit is always there and they bond with each other tighter and tighter during tough stretches. Eventually, they merged into one incredible Hulk.

Today they gave me a great deal of jubilance by trouncing the Lakers out of this universe. When was the last time you see a team led by Phil Jackson received such an ass-whooping in a NBA Final's game?

I think comparing to any other identities (even Kings' fan included), I am just more favoured to be an anti-Lakers fan. And this gives me a very strong reason to keep watching Celtics' game, as they are the most successful team in this league to defeat Lakers, some times in a totally dominant way like today.

Cherishing every moment as you should. For once, "Beat L.A." is executed in resounding fashion.

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