Baseball

This is going to be about a hurling man – but let’s start with some baseball.

Like boxing, America’s Game is one that lends itself to great sports-writing. And it entices some of the best to huddle here with us in the damp, shadowy corners of the back pages.

When John Updike – one of the bold-face names of 20th century literature – gambolled into Fenway Park one sunny afternoon, he unknowingly sat into the bleachers of the famous old chocolate box of a stadium on the last day of the legendary Ted Williams’ career at bat.

The smiling writer watched curiously for the duration and was ultimately so exercised by the theatre that played out in his lap that he submitted a now-celebrated piece to the renowned New Yorker magazine.

Updike sketches wonderfully Williams’ curmudgeonly farewell speech to Boston, before he typically spits a final rebuke to those in the press-box or “the maestros of the keyboard up there”.

Ultimately, Updike explains how Williams dotted a full stop in his cartoon-strip career with a final, predictable home run.

“Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs – hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted ‘We want Ted’ for minutes after, he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

Gods do not answer letters. Home run, John.

(Incidentally, Ted Williams – the greatest they ever saw in Boston – died in 2002 . Sparking a very messy legal mud fight, two of his children froze his head cryogenically. Some insisted that the signature they insisted franked his approval of this unusual request was merely an autograph. Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly visited the icy head once, starting his subsequent column: “Hung out with Ted Williams the other day. Pretty cool. He’s spending his time in a one-storey cement building in a warehouse district next to the Scottsdale, Ariz., airport, frozen, upside down, waiting for science to bring him back from the dead.”)

Some time ago, I wrote here of Clare man Flan Marsh. A roofer by trade, he filled the now yawning days in his workshop at the end of the garden where he developed – slowly but surely – a hurley, that like himself, does not break.

His patent-pending technology involves lacing the hurley – still an authentic piece of ash – with a filament that holds it together safely as it cracks in the white heat of battle. This grit in the oyster prevents the familiar sight of half a hurley spinning dangerously into the summer sky.

I drove up to Broadford and stood in the centre of the club’s field before witnessing a full-blooded demonstration. It works.

So… here come the fast-talking Americans in ten-gallon hats and smelling of crisp dollar bills. A friend of Marsh’s in the States read the article online, opened up the Gmail account and fired off an email to baseball’s biggest of wigs.

Ten minutes later, a reply dropped in from ‘the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball’ on Park Avenue in New York. Now we’re in business.

This morning in Broadford in east Clare, the out-of-work roofer is waiting on 60 bats to arrive from the MLB.

It’s estimated – in the big leagues alone – that players go through approximately one bat every 50 at-bats. Where these sharp, fast-travelling missiles land, nobody knows. A firm of New York lawyers are kept busy with law suits caused by broken bats spiking into the cheap seats. With his new technology, Marsh will send the suits to the Hamptons early.

He plans to pump the bats with his silver lining and bounce them back to the new world where they await inspection in a lab by MLB’s experts. In the meantime, he’s kept going with the hurleys in his shed.

On Tuesday he bumped into former Banner manager Ger Loughnane and pressed one of the sticks into his hand. The Sunday Game pundit swung it around, examined the unusual spine with the intelligence that won two All-Irelands and offered Marsh his congratulations.

When Christy Cooney, GAA president, was in the county for the Feile na Gael last week, so too he was treated to a new hurley.

“I’m delirious. It’s very exciting,” he said this week. “The bats are made from ash – same as the hurleys – and we can fix them no problem at all.

“I’m run off my feet with the hurleys too – more than ever – and that’s great. But the baseball bats could be massive; they have a problem – and I can solve it.”

God may not answer letters. But he replies to his emails pretty quickly.

adrianrussell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell