The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, (Harper Perennial Modern Classic, 2006), 474 pages.
The Brooklyn Dodgers of the early Fifties deserve a place in the annals of baseball history. Roger Kahn’s much-loved book has ensured that this is the case. The games, the players, and the struggles against racial prejudice will always be vividly remembered, in no small part thanks to the enduring appeal of The Boys of Summer.
Kahn grew up in Brooklyn as a Dodgers fan, his obsession with baseball being fanned by his father and bemoaned by his classicist mother. At ten years old, during a “summer of tragedyâ€, he faced the painful reality that he would “never be good enough for the Dodgersâ€. Little could he have known at the time that he would eventually set foot in the Dodgers’ clubhouse, serving as the beat writer for the Herald Tribune during the 1952 and ’53 seasons.
The events of these two years naturally are central to the book, yet it is driven by wider themes: mortality, relationships and prejudice. It is a book about baseball and life. In this updated form that is felt even more keenly as his “Epilogue for the 1990s and the Millennium†reveals the life of the book itself and the impact it has had since it was first published in 1972. Kahn’s own life plays a central role to the narrative of the Boys of Summer and this is one of its strengths.
There is undoubtedly a time and place for a detached, almost impersonal tone when writing about the lives of other people. Robert Creamer’s biography of Babe Ruth is a compelling case in point: the author almost steadfastly refuses to inject his own thoughts and opinions into the proceedings. Yet in this case, it is precisely because Kahn has a real, emotional attachment to the Dodgers that the story comes to life.
Perhaps the reader looking for a detailed account of the 1952-53 Dodgers would impatiently skim through the passages about Kahn’s rise through the ranks of the Herald Tribune and his development as a writer. But his time spent as a beat reporter – the long hours, endless deadlines and constant travelling – can only be understood when you appreciate the dedication he showed to reach his calling. And there is an obvious comparison here to the years of training that the players went through to be sat in the clubhouse where Kahn observed their characteristics and changing moods.
Whether true or not, there is a sense that Kahn’s spell with the Dodgers mirrored the experience of the players. It was his time in the Major Leagues; the period around which his life has revolved. The years leading up to it were devoted to preparing him for the task and the years since have been immeasurably coloured, yet somewhat overshadowed, by the events.
The second half of the book, where Kahn meets up with each of the former team members nearly twenty years later, illustrates this effect on the players. While Gil Hodges was managing the Mets, the rest of the players had slipped back into the lives of ordinary citizens.
There are no displays of self-importance or glorying in their former glory days. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Clem Labine’s tales of missing his family, George Shuba’s emphasis on hard work over natural talent, Andy Pafko’s recollection of the emotions felt when he was traded, and Carl Furillo’s bitterness at the way he felt he had been blacklisted by the baseball community after suing the Dodgers (“lousy bastards†as Furillo describes them) are all told in a matter-of-fact way. They were ballplayers on an historic team and can therefore be remembered in that way, yet they were just normal people, as susceptible to the ravages of time as the rest of us.
The Fifties are seen by many as the golden era of baseball and the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the iconic teams of the decade. In the two years Kahn reported on the side, they were defeated by the Yankees twice in the World Series. “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat†claims the author. But just five years later, the Dodgers disappeared to the West Coast accompanied by their cross-town rival Giants.
Ebbets Field, once spied upon from any slight vantage point that Kahn and many other children could find, was soon replaced by a “tall stand of faceless, red-brick buildingsâ€. The Boys of Summer quickly vanished from the area they had once transfixed, leaving behind little physical trace of their activities.
Their legacy, however, was written by one member of their team. The Brooklyn Dodgers came to be remembered as the Jackie Robinson Dodgers. Surely no sportsman has ever matched the cultural and political influence that Robinson had on America? He ‘broke the colour barrier’ in 1947, forty years before John Barnes was back-heeling bananas on a football pitch in England.
The racial discrimination suffered by Robinson and his contemporaries is laid bare: black players were often barred from staying in the same hotels or travelling in the same vehicles as their white team mates. The verbal and physical abuse they suffered, from ‘fans’, opposing players and sometimes even their own team ‘mates’ is hard to comprehend.
Kahn’s struggles in reporting the events at the time are illuminating as well. Responding to Robinson’s accusations of racial abuse directed at him by the St Louis team, he swallowed Cardinals manager Ed Stanky’s denial and gave both sides of the story equal billing in his article, only to realise soon after that he had been “played … for a foolâ€. His efforts to redress the balance were met by a cold message from his employers: “Note to Kahn: Herald Tribune will not be a sounding board for Jackie Robinson. Write baseball, not race relations. Story killedâ€.
A newspaper editor can make such decisions, but trying to separate baseball and race relations was a political act designed to deliberately downplay how entwined the two were. Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers held up a mirror to the widespread racial prejudice which many were (are?) keen to ignore. Thanks to Robinson and his colleagues, the issue was no longer avoidable.
This is a legendary book about a legendary team covering an immensely important and exciting period of baseball’s history. If you don’t have a copy, you should buy one immediately. If you do own a copy, fetch it down from the shelf and read it again. The Boys of Summer deserves a place in any baseball fan’s collection.
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Among the many great things about this wonderful book is the insight it provides into the life of a journalist at the time. Some of the anecdotes should leave anyone who has an interest in writing. For me, the one about the budding reporter who cleverly penned the headline “Braves die with their boots” about a team losing a game on errors is the best – to his disgust, he finds that an “on” has inevitably been appended before print as it went through an oblivious copy-editor. Simply brilliant writing.
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