Kurt Vonnegut on Sports

Shortly after his 2007 death, it was discovered that Kurt Vonnegut had once written for Sports Illustrated.

The story goes that he was told to write about a horse that jumped the rail and ran amok in the infield, but after sitting at his desk for hours he left the building silently.

The only thing written on his now abandoned typewriter was this:

The horse jumped over the fucking fence.

It would seem that these seven words are all that Vonnegut would contribute to the world of sports journalism, truly a devastating blow for a genre that now includes Jay Mariotti, Bill Plaschke and Skip Bayless.

Fortunately, after almost two years of research, I’ve found an astounding number of other such attempts by the illustrious writer. These items were not easy to track down as they did not appear in reputable publications. It seems as though most of his work was published by World Classics Library, a Los Angeles based company that specialized in hardcore pornography. For these magazines he wouldn’t have to worry about editors or deadlines, as they simply used what he wrote to add bulk to their issues so they could charge a higher price. Oftentimes they would change the name of what he had written. For instance, a story on Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, originally titled The Catch became Giant Snatch.

It might come as a surprise that towards the end of his life Vonnegut began to write about a subject he never showed any real affinity for. Maybe he wanted to remark about the cultural impact of the games and their historic moments or maybe he just wanted to show that he could write a story about a horse jumping over a fucking fence. And although Kurt is up in Heaven now, I’m sure he would be thrilled that these works finally reach a more suitable audience.

The Catch or Giant Snatch, after the jump

Listen:

The New York Giants and Cleveland Indians were professional baseball teams playing in the World Series in 1954. New York and Cleveland are approximately 500 miles apart. This series had been in existence since 1903 and had received the moniker “World Series” despite the fact that its first two participants were Boston and Pittsburgh. Two cities that are from the same hemisphere, the same continent, the same country and, in fact, approximately 500 miles apart. In 1954 the league still only featured teams from one country, but today Major League Baseball now has teams in two.

The series lasted four games all won by the Giants and this is the story of the first.

The highlight of Game 1 came in the top of the eight with the score knotted at two. Vic Wertz stepped to the plate and launched a deep fly ball off of Don Liddle. The ball is reported to have traveled some 450 feet. It would have reached the stands in most parks, but this particular stadium had a cavernous center field which gave it the shape of a bathtub. A bathtub is a plumbing fixture that some humans use to wash themselves. It looked like this:

As it is one of the few places where humans feel comfortable being naked, American cities, most notably Boston, banned the act of bathing when the tub was first introduced. It was not until President Millard Fillmore had one installed in the White House in 1850 that the invention became more widely accepted.

When the ball leapt off of Wertz’s bat, people in the stands assumed that their centerfielder, Willie Mays would catch it. He was a baseball catching machine. As Mays sprinted after the ball and time seemed to slowdown, the fans began to doubt themselves. They were doubting machines. The fans were both right and wrong. Mays hauled in the baseball, quickly turned and threw the ball toward the infield. This ensured that Larry Doby, the first black to play in the American League, wouldn’t score a crucial run. The announcer called the play an “optical illusion.” He was an enthusiasm machine which was useful for calling baseball games.

The above history of the bathtub isn’t true. It was a hoax perpetrated by H.L. Mencken. Many people and so-called reputable sources took it as fact when it came out, many still do. It’s amazing what people will believe.

Just eight years before neither Mays nor Doby would have been in the World Series. Not because they weren’t good enough, but because they had too much pigment in his skin. For the first forty-three series blacks were not allowed to play. A handful of genes caused them to have far too much of the wrong type of melanin. It was deemed performance enhancing.

One of the main proponents of this segregation was the commissioner himself Kennesaw Mountain Landis. A former federal judge Landis had been instrumental in banning Jack Johnson, the first black Heavyweight Champion of the world, from the sport of boxing. He charged Johnson with violating the Mann Act, a piece of legislation whose stated purpose was to help curb prostitution. Instead it was used as a means to harass blacks. Here is a picture of Commissioner Landis:

These grown men were thought of as animals and sometimes treated as such. The park in which this game was played had been built for animals. It was called the Polo Grounds. It had been built for playing polo. Polo involves humans riding on top of horses while trying to hit a ball made of wood or plastic with a mallet. A mallet looked like this:

The mane of the horse is shaved off so that the mallet does not get tangled. This is known as hogging. In recent years hogging has come to mean a competition among men with low self-esteem to see who can have sex with the largest woman, whom they assume has low self-esteem.

The catch kept the score knotted at 2 and in the tenth Dusty Rhodes hit a three-run home run to give the Giants the game. They would go on to win the series 4-0. If this series had been played today it would have been called the worst of all-time, a real stinkeroo. Yet somehow it managed to create one of the more iconic images in baseball history. Odd.