An Uncle Tom memory

My Uncle Tom died this week. My father’s younger brother, he was the sixth of seven siblings and the last of them to survive. Following a lingering illness, his death came as a relief, and as an occasion for reminiscence.

Perhaps because he never married, or perhaps because he lived for years in his parents’ home caring for his aging mother, it seemed to me that Uncle Tom held more strongly than his siblings qualities that I perceived as quintessentially “McCormick.” Among these were generosity; a sense of purpose and duty, including to family; and an ethical core unwavering in its sense of right and wrong. Uncle Tom was kind, friendly, and a font of engaging stories; he remembered every birthday; he took nieces and nephews on extravagant trips (including my brother and me to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal). We always enjoyed his visits. But, like all McCormicks, his judgments could be sharp. And he harbored a steeliness that could edge into severity, which at times cowed me.

One Uncle Tom memory holds a distinguished place in my trove of family lore. Its taproot, as with any Uncle Tom story, is kindness and generosity: he flew across the country, along with my parents and my mother’s stepsister, Sheila Dowd, to celebrate my college graduation, in the Hudson Valley of New York, in 1988.

After the ceremony, that quartet of adults took a friend and me on a week-long trip through upstate New York and New England. We rented a van. My father and Uncle Tom handled the driving and sat in front; my mother and Aunt Sheila consulted maps and sat in the middle seats; and my friend and I sat in the back: a congenial group.

One day featured a long drive through New Hampshire and a good distance into Maine. As was typical, Mom and Aunt Sheila maintained a lively conversation, sparked by observations from guidebooks that littered the middle seats. We stopped for an early lunch, then began a long trek up I-95 to our next hotel, with Uncle Tom at the wheel. At some point, the two women agreed, we should break up the afternoon by stopping at a local tourist destination. They busied themselves researching possibilities. I can’t recall what they selected: a maritime museum, a gallery, a Victorian mansion. But it was right off the interstate, and we could stretch our legs for 20 minutes. It was coming up, in just three or four exits. Uncle Tom drove on, silent. Aunt Sheila read aloud one guidebook’s description; Mom read another’s. Now it was just one exit away. We barreled along. The exit approached. “Here it is!” Aunt Sheila said. Uncle Tom kept his foot on the accelerator. Mom leaned forward. “It’s this exit, Tom,” she said. Uncle Tom said nothing, aimed the van straight ahead, and sped past. “We need to -- ah, well,” Aunt Sheila said, craning to glimpse the road not taken, then slumping in her seat. My friend and I looked at each other, eyes wide. My mother and Aunt Sheila formed a formidable pair; I couldn’t recall anyone ignoring them in quite this way. And Uncle Tom was usually so solicitous. No one spoke. Then, perhaps five miles up the road, Uncle Tom announced, “We’re going to get to the hotel, and we’re going to have a drink!” Which, an hour or so later, is precisely what we did. We checked into the hotel; Uncle Tom or Dad pulled a bottle of Irish from a suitcase; I filled the ice bucket; somebody brought out the mixed nuts; and we all sat in the hotel suite and had a drink. Sitting in a padded chair, holding his sweating plastic cup, Uncle Tom let out a long exhale and said, “Aaah, baby!” with what seemed particular satisfaction.

I took a solo trip in Scotland last summer, walking for a week across the southern lowlands, sleeping each night in a different town. In the mornings I stopped often, taking pictures, admiring scenery. But after lunch as the sun lowered and I grew weary and my destination beckoned I would up my pace and pause less, pulled by visions of the Scotch I would soon sip at the local pub. Uncle Tom, I realized, knew of what he spoke: We’re going to get to the hotel, and we’re going to have a drink. Each evening I drank a silent toast in his honor.

Gratification Delayed; or, Why Last Night’s Mets Game Matters

Over a lifetime, I’ve pruned my sports watching. As a boy in the 1970s in a sports-obsessed household I watched everything U.S. TV networks offered and read my weekly Sports Illustrated as if it would save my soul. The 1972 Munich Olympics cost me innocence -- the killing of Israeli athletes and the officials’ theft of the gold-medal men’s basketball game (which, to be honest, affected my 8-year-old self far more deeply) made me forever skeptical of nostrums about “fair play” and “character.” In my teens I gave up college football and most college basketball, sickened by the NCAA’s Avery Brundage-level hypocrisy about the “student athlete” while a cadre of men in suits made millions. Hockey was never part of my Northern California sports culture. In my 20s I gave up the NBA regular season -- my team, the Golden State Warriors, was generally awful, and little mattered until Playoff Theatre. (I have good company; LeBron James said last week, “I’m not one to get caught up in the regular season.”) I stopped watching tennis, a sport that has never figured out its calendar. (Now a New Yorker, I do buy an annual grounds-pass for a day at the U.S. Open.) The Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988 were my last, killed by NBC’s soap opera treatment. (If I could attend a Games alongside a knowledgable companion with a nose for competition -- say, Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe -- I’d go.) My dad and brother loved golf, but I never got the bug and at some pre-Tiger point realized its country-club culture was irredeemable. In my 30s I won a March Madness pool, decided the winnings weren’t worth the work, and shut down my last vestige of college spectation. In my 40s I weaned myself from the NFL: the league’s corporatized greed put too many bales on the camel, the tipping bale being its tobacco-industry-like treatment of players with brain injuries; I felt like a Roman enjoying the spectacle of lions ripping apart criminals and Christians. 

Baseball remains. It suffers from the problems afflicting all major U.S. sports: rich-boy owners reminiscent of Russian oligarchs; league officials unable to rein the oligarchs in; an addict’s relationship to TV money; casually cruel treatment of its athletes (see: steroid use); routine disregard of its fans. Too often the game’s poohbahs are short-sighted to the point of idiocy. The 1994 lockout and World Series cancellation put at least two stakes in my heart. (That then-Commissioner Bud Selig won recent election to the Hall of Fame sickens me.)

But each spring, the games impel me to push open my crypt. A key reason: the regular-season grind of 162 games matters. Granted, it matters far less than it used to. The 10-team playoff format evens the field; a 106-win behemoth may well fail to show its edge over an 85-win wild card entrant over five or seven games. But daily ball from April to September, the unspooling of a hundred stories (the aging star, the fireballing phenom, the flawed middle-infield defense, the inexplicable pinch-hitting prowess, the absence of a capable lefty in the bullpen, a string of late-inning comebacks), make for a winnowing process that rewards close attention. The game’s narrative richness allows me to enjoy a sparsely-attended September tussle between also-rans. (Growing up in the ‘70s as a San Francisco Giants fan, I got a lot of practice.) Watching good teams play meaningful games is a bonus.

Regular-season integrity partially explains the one spectator sport I’ve added as an adult: English Premier League football. The structural imbalance between the league's dregs and its Rich Six (Tottenham, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea) is offset by its perfect schedule (each team plays each foe twice, once at home and once away); its race not just for a title but for the four top spots to qualify for the enriching European Champions League; and the simultaneous race to avoid a bottom-three finish that will “relegate” a team to a lower division (to be replaced by the top-3 finishers in the division below). When each game matters, great theatre results. 

All of this is meant to explain my response to an idiotic idea being bandied about by the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s office. To cut game times (a commissioner obsession that has already resulted in a wrong-headed rule allowing automatic intentional walks), the league is pondering the contamination of extra innings. The rule was used at last month’s World Baseball Classic tournament: once you reach the 11th inning, each team starts with a runner (the batter who made the last out of the 10th) on second base. This of course promotes scoring, hastens a game’s conclusion, and sends impatient fans to the parking lot and to bed. 

As a counterargument, allow me to present a single piece of evidence: last night’s Mets-Marlins 16-inning, 5-hour-and-38-minute, Einstein-On-The-Beach epic. The 9-inning preliminary was crammed with event: a Marcell Ozuna 1st-inning grand slam; an immediate tying Mets riposte, highlighted by a bases-clearing triple by catcher Travis d’Arnaud; a trio of middle-inning Mets solo homers, two by Yoenis Cespedes; an answering 4-run Marlins rally, ending with d'Arnaud body slammed but holding on to a Jay Bruce throw to cut down a runner at the plate; a Mets’ bid thwarted in the 7th when Cespedes ran past a coach’s stop sign, declined to slide, and got thrown out at the plate himself; and, an inning later, a tying 2-out rally (d’Arnaud single, pinch-hitter Michael Conforto double): Mets 8, Marlins 8.  

Then, as so often happens in baseball’s multi-act dramas, the Peckinpah reel turned into a Bergman retrospective: aimlessness, exhaustion, gathering darkness. After 10 innings the strapping 28-year-old d’Arnaud, wracked by four hours of squatting and pitch calling and ball blocking, needed help to descend the dugout stairs. Ninety more minutes passed. Innings 9 through 15 featured a parade of feckless at-bats, with no Mets and a lone Marlin reaching as far as second base. Amid the gloom came sparkles of light: Mets reliever Josh Smoker, barely hanging on to his roster spot, pitched three spotless innings; righty Hansel Robles, promised a night off after pitching in three straight games, told Manager Terry Collins he could go and trotted out to pitch a clean 15th. (It was either him, Collins said later, or backup catcher Rene Rivera.) 

Leading off the 16th, d’Arnaud deposited a 1-0 fastball into the left field stands for his fourth hit, third run, and fourth RBI: the game of his life. Robles trudged back out and walked the leadoff batter. Dangerous Giancarlo Stanton lined out to right. Dangerous Justin Bour struck out. Manager Collins then faced a choice: pitch to the dangerous Marcel Ozuna (two walks and two hits in seven plate appearances, including the grand slam, and 16 RBIs in the season’s nine games)? Or walk him intentionally and face, in Miami’s jury-rigged and depleted lineup, Adam Conley, a starting pitcher with 9 hits in 61 career at-bats (.138), no extra base hits and 32 strikeouts? Miami had no alternatives. Collins spun the wheel and instructed Robles to face Ozuna with only breaking pitches, preferably off the plate. Robles proceeded to throw a non-sliding slider that hung over the plate; Ozuna crushed it 400 feet, where it dropped to earth 8 feet in front of the center field fence, into the glove of Juan Lagares. Mets 9, Marlins 8. Had ‘em all the way. 

In the scope of any baseball season, a win in the season’s 10th game is of little note. But, come what may, any recap of the 2017 Mets will feature d’Arnaud’s weary legs trotting home in the 16th (“I think the excitement and adrenaline of the home run helped”), Robles’ dangling arm, Collins’ decision. And then: how will the teams bounce back? What will happen to the Mets bullpen should their starters falter over the weekend? How will they muddle through this series, and the next, and the next? Will any of it matter in their drive for an unprecedented third-straight playoff appearance? None of this would come to mind had Michael Conforto and then A.J. Ellis started the 11th inning standing undeservedly on second base. 

Is your average fan likely to stay in her seat or on his couch for five-and-a-half hours and 16 innings? Of course not. But baseball, by definition, is about gratification delayed. (Sometimes for as long as 108 years.) This isn’t to say all change is bad. Cut game times by enforcing existing rules (on time between pitches, say) and limiting mound visits. (See the Arizona Diamondbacks for a team that turns every game to a late-inning slog, with catchers often running to the mound several times in one at-bat.) But the sport is not in crisis; certainly its owners’ wallets have never been fatter. Why damage its integrity to chase misguided notions of what fans want? Why not allow its stories to unfold, then celebrate them? Why not teach a new generation of fans to appreciate its long haul? 

"The Underground Railroad"

In the week that it won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad." Whitehead tackles a massive social ill -- the devastation of the nation's soul wrought by American slavery and American racism -- by charting its effects on individuals. The story is gripping, its fictions (an actual railroad beneath the soil; a state-by-state response to slavery's impending demise that is bone-chillingly believable) as instructive as its grounding in historical research. The strength of its plot and its characters, including the unforgettable slave hunter Ridgeway, makes it clear why producers are turning it into a mini-series.

The book also offers quieter pleasures. I found myself moved by a pair of late-book passages. Cora, the protagonist, who has found harbor in an Indiana settlement for runaway slaves and other diasporic Africans, listens to a visiting poet and is left cold: "Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world." 

Then, on the very next page, a friend gives her a gift of a new almanac, a form of book foundational to her haphazard education. "She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She'd never been the first person to open a book."

Cora's fierce will to be educated, and the quiet description of her love for the book as physical object, left me wondering if, a generation or so hence, her descendants would find a more peaceful place to open themselves to the passions (of poetry, of prayer) that Cora must find "regrettable." In the midst of the novel's unsparing vision, the scene demonstrates a cultural indomitability that's as close as Whitehead skirts to hope.