Loved It: The Boys of Summer

Abstract

Loved It: The Boys of Summer Karen E. Kubara (bio) Roger Kahn aspired to be a writer. When the crunch came, he promised himself to write one book, his book, about the things and places and people he loved.1 That his subject was baseball is particularly American. Writers had been inspired by organized baseball almost from its beginning. The press box at the Polo Grounds circa 1907– 11 “could easily have been mistaken for an outdoor literary club,” sportswriter Bozeman Bulger once said.2 In The Boys of Summer Kahn is fan, reporter, and literary artist. His book is a classic. I call as my first witness Brett McKay of theartofmanliness.com. After studying the classics in college, McKay will tell you why every man should study classical culture. We know Kahn grew up immersed in the classics, at school and at home, which, to the dismay of some readers, comes through in his writing. McKay, his wife Kate, and their team have compiled a list: 100 Books Every Man Should Read over his lifetime, “a library that centers on books that expand mind and soul, build new mental models, allowing you to become more culturally literate and thus better able to participate in the ‘Great Conversation.’”3 (Lord knows we could use more cultural literacy out there.) Among the works of Jane Austen, Aristotle, and The Art of War by Sun Tzu; Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and Herodotus; The Federalist Papers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Orwell’s 1984, and Self-Control: Its Kinship and Majesty, you’ll find one sports book, Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer. This book is “inspiring enough to make a man hope for another shot on the diamond and join a local soft ball crew.”4 But it also addresses the “big ideas” that philosophers, theologians, and artists have mulled over for thousands of years: What is justice? What is true friendship? What is love? What is honor? How do you live a good life? In The Boys of Summer, not only does Kahn explore such questions, but also, as he brings out, does each man on the team. [End Page 1] The title was the spark. Kahn traces the idea for his book to the evening in 1952 when he heard Dylan Thomas “sonorously” recite in tones of surpassing beauty, “I see the boys of summer in their ruin . . .”5 Over the years ideas for the book evolved, but “baseball became [his] magic portal.”6 The boys of summer, the pleasant lilt of those five syllables, the soft vowels, the bucolic connotations are only part of the first line of the poem. Kahn quotes the complete line prominently on its own page following the table of contents. Clearly it resonated with him. If your eyes are rolling, “This is a baseball journal, lady,” you won’t be surprised that Kahn’s publishers balked at the title. It comes from a poem? Poetry doesn’t sell. “Safely, prosaically, dully,” Kahn’s editor wanted to call the book The Team.7 It took months of debate for Kahn to prevail. Why did he insist? “Is there one basic point to all fine poetry?” Kahn had asked Robert Frost. “The phrase . . . a clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart.”8 And that is why The Boys of Summer and not The Team became the title of Kahn’s book. The Team conjures naught, while The Boys of Summer is so loaded with color and suggestion it became a baseball meme, a synonym for ballplayers in their fleeting prime.9 In 1959 Kahn wrote an article about Babe Ruth for Esquire, in which he stated, “I set down the big man as he really was, with the booze, the babes, the insensitivity, the excess, as well as the howitzer homeruns.” Kahn was creating innovative sports journalism, he says, “hard- edged but not cruel . . . making a hero mortal but scarcely ordinary.”10 That article won the E. P. Dutton Prize for best sports magazine article of the year, reinforcing the approach, Kahn says, that was critical to The Boys of Summer. “In an era of hero worship,” Carl Erskine said, “Kahn...