Pafko at the Wall
By Don DeLillo
Scribner/$16
For those of you still basking in the glow of the brilliant 2001 World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees, there is hope. No, we're not suggesting that the majors won't experience a lockout/strike/contraction in the months to come. Who knows what will happen there? But there is hope for baseball fans enjoying at least part of their winter if they can scoop up Don DeLillo's brief and brilliant Pafko at the Wall.
DeLillo's novella has been published to mark the 50th anniversary of the so-called "Shot Heard 'Round the World" (sports loves its hyperboles), a.k.a. Bobby Thompson's homer that won the Giants the pennant and sent the Dodgers home to wait until next year. Masterfully written from end to end, Pafko is a high point in 20th century sportswriting from one of America's foremost novelists.
Pafko at the Wall doesn't offer a traditional narrative, but treats that famous game and its famous homer as an opportunity to create a group portrait of American life at a time when the Cold War was just starting to heat up. Oct. 3, 1951, was the same day the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atom bomb. This geopolitical detail is in fact whispered to one of the fans at Polo Grounds that day — that fan being none other than CIA director J. Edgar Hoover, who attends the game with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor. Somehow, we're not talking about sports anymore.
Hoover's judgmental, germophobic consciousness is but one of many that DeLillo moves in and out of as his account of the Dodgers-Giants game proceeds. Since many readers will already know who won — both the game and the Cold War — the author seamlessly weaves together public and private, individual and collective experiences of the game: the raw-throated broadcaster, the players on the field, the fans in the stands and in the streets of New York neighborhoods. Central to the novella are an odd pair — a young black kid who crashed the gate and a well-to-do businessman — and these two find themselves in competition for possession of the very ball that Thompson hit. But what becomes of that famous — or infamous — ball is a story for another day. All in all, Pafko at the Wall takes the reader back to a moment in American civilization and lets the details speak for themselves. What they say is for you to decide. Maybe, after all is said and done, it's just about the game.
Let's hope Bud Selig will keep that in mind.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2002.