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

The Red Sox beat the Yankees in the baseball season opener on Sunday after a five-year-old fan delivered Herb Brooks’ famous ‘miracle’ speech.

With thanks to Stephen O’Leary for the heads-up. It’s worth a watch – especially for Fenway’s reaction when he sticks it to the Yankees.

I saw this in the latest episode last night and thought of you guys.

And here’s some good dancing from my favourite character in the show.

The great American novelist John Updike, though not a sports writer, did at times indulge his nation’s favourite pasttime. And when he did, he hit a home run.

Updike, who passed away this year, was once in Boston to visit a friend. He knocked on the door, received no answer, so with a summer’s afternoon to kill he headed to the Red Sox’s famous old home, Fenway Park, for his first visit. He picked a good day. While the press box was bloated with the city’s jaded baseball beat reporters, Updike, like a scientist who inadvertently discovers a much sought-after remedy, found he was witnessing, from the bleachers, the last game – and the memorable farewell – of Sox giant Ted Williams.

He dispatched a song of a report to the New Yorker magazine recounting poetically William’s typically cranky so-long speech and the home-run that was the denouement to a heroic career at bat. “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.” Wow.

Those who stumbled upon the championship game in the B division of Ireland’s baseball league last Saturday may not have realised they had wandered into their own little Fenway, but I wondered what Updike might have made of the apple pie scene folded into Clondalkin all the same.

Munster Warrior players are strectched out on the grass in preparation for the final game of their maiden season. The motley playing roster are, in turn, relaxing in fold-up chairs, swapping last-minute tips, talking about their favourite TV comedy (it’s The Inbetweeners) and discussing Saturday night’s planned celebrations in Limerick city. They have a record this year of 12-0. And judging by the mood, everyone expects to make it 13 for 13 with a win over today’s opponents: The Hurricanes.

One man, the Warriors’ player neatly epitomises the playing of baseball in Ireland. Meet Mynor Murphy, the team’s stout and steady catcher who smiles through his face guard and offers advice to the novices around him. Probably the world’s only Corkman to speak with a Panamanian accent, he fits right in. “I grew up all my life in Panama – in a plantation exporting Chiquita bananas to Europe and the US. Panama has a relationship with the US with the canal so baseball would be the national sport with boxing; I was playing baseball all my life.

“I came to Cork seven years ago because my father is from there and lives there, and I played soccer because Cork didn’t have a baseball team in the past. Then we formed the Munster baseball team. We have a great team, we are having fun all year and we didn’t lose any match. There are Irish guys with a softball background, a few American guys and the Canadaian manager. I feel integrated.”

That Canadian is Eric Kelly, a chiropractor now living on Leeside (the majority of his charges are based in Limerick, where the side play their home ties). Though nursing an injured ankle he’s togged out in his navy and red uniform. His day started early Saturday morning as he packed the car with three bags – one for bats and balls, one for catchers’ mitts and one for helmets. He then picks up a few teammates in Limerick and they set off for Dublin for the last time this season. “The standard is a little bit lower than I’m used to but it’s getting a lot better and we’ve been excellent. It’s not meant to be very competitive and we have a lot of fun every time we go out.”

Now, after the Warriors give up six runs in the third inning, Kelly hobbles to the mound to replace the starting pitcher, an American named Bill, who can clock off till next year. It’s the first time all season that the Warriors have been behind.

When one member of the team feels unwell, one of the replacement players, previously sitting cross legged with a cigarette on a fold-up chair, casually filling in the scorecard is pressed into action. If they are to win this pendant, it’ll be the hard way. When he sets for his very first swing against the Hurricane pitcher, he feels the ball bounce off his head and the umpire tells him to walk to first base. “Hey that’s one way to do it!” Kelly shouts from the bench.

Kieran Manning, though one of the team members with little background in America’s game, is one of the most vociferous players in the diamond. “I’m playing about a year and half. It takes ages to get into it, I’m usually happy to make any kind of contact. You have to accept you’re going to make an arse of yourself most of the time,” he advises.

Not so today. To the acclaim of the teammates behind the cage he darts the ball to centre field with the bases loaded and he manages to round the field with a teammate to tie it up. “So you have played this game before?” he asks an American teammate who greets him at home base after completing his run.

Ultimately, to Kelly’s delight, the Warriors rally and take the win by one run, ensuring they return to Dublin next week to collect their trophy at a special presentation.

For now, they gather at home base for a team picture in the centre of what is affectionately called the Field of Dreams. One-time owner of the LA Dodgers, Irish-American Peter O’Malley stumped up the cash in the 1990s to develop this corner of Corkagh Park in West Dublin.

Updike’s re-telling of Williams’ last homer creaks under the weight of his talent but it’s the picture of the rickety, idiosyncratic ball ground that is the high watermark that the rest are still snorkelling beneath. “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”

In Corkagh Park, a long way from Fenway, the pens are painted green, pitchers complain of an uneven mound that causes them to lose balance and runners admit a weariness of the coarse surface that ruthlessly rips their legs when they slide into a plate. But they built it, and they’ll continue to come.

This column first appeared in the Irish Examiner newspaper on September 30, 2009

Dock Phillip Ellis played baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates and famously threw a no-hitter in 1970 – apparently under the influence of LSD. Here, the tale is re-imagined with narration from the man himself. Top drawer stuff.

NOTE: I’ve come across this in a few places this week (Sport is a TV Show, Tripping Along the Edge, Funny or Die are three)

Here’s a few interesting bits and pieces that people have been saying and writing this week. Incidentally, the increased post count here can be attributed to me abstaining from alcohol for the month. Like when George gave up sex in Seinfeld and ended up learning Portuguese.

Crystal Meth is a helluva drug. So says my favourite tennis punk Andre Agassi in a 60 minutes interview.

Meet the guy who has caught 3000 baseballs at MLB games.

The remote-controlled bowling ball. At last.

Fighting styles that’ll get your ass kicked. I’m looking at you capoeira.

Everyone watching Chelsea beat Man United last Sunday saw a guy in the crowd behind the bench, brushing his teeth. Here, he explains his actions. He’s a playa.

We bend, touch, pause and engage with Hollywood’s take on the 1995 Rugby World Cup on the Irish Examiner sportsdesk blog. Thanks to Simon Lewis.

Being part of Manny Pacquiao’s entourage means you get to sleep at the end of his bed. They’re a wacky bunch.

And for those who haven’t heard, a diplomatic incident erupts over the French Federation’s request for a box for President Sarkozy at Croker.

The great American novelist John Updike, though not a sports writer, did at times indulge his nation’s favourite pasttime. And when he did, he hit a home run.

Updike, who passed away this year, was once in Boston to visit a friend. He knocked on the door, received no answer, so with a summer’s afternoon to kill he headed to the Red Sox’s famous old home, Fenway Park, for his first visit. He picked a good day. While the press box was bloated with the city’s jaded baseball beat reporters, Updike, like a scientist who inadvertently discovers a much sought-after remedy, found he was witnessing, from the bleachers, the last game – and the memorable farewell – of Sox giant Ted Williams.

He dispatched a song of a report to the New Yorker magazine recounting poetically William’s typically cranky so-long speech and the home-run that was the denouement to a heroic career at bat. “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.” Wow.

Those who stumbled upon the championship game in the B division of Ireland’s baseball league last Saturday may not have realised they had wandered into their own little Fenway, but I wondered what Updike might have made of the apple pie scene folded into Clondalkin all the same.

Munster Warrior players are strectched out on the grass in preparation for the final game of their maiden season. The motley playing roster are, in turn, relaxing in fold-up chairs, swapping last-minute tips, talking about their favourite TV comedy (it’s The Inbetweeners) and discussing Saturday night’s planned celebrations in Limerick city. They have a record this year of 12-0. And judging by the mood, everyone expects to make it 13 for 13 with a win over today’s opponents: The Hurricanes.

One man, the Warriors’ player neatly epitomises the playing of baseball in Ireland. Meet Mynor Murphy, the team’s stout and steady catcher who smiles through his face guard and offers advice to the novices around him. Probably the world’s only Corkman to speak with a Panamanian accent, he fits right in. “I grew up all my life in Panama – in a plantation exporting Chiquita bananas to Europe and the US. Panama has a relationship with the US with the canal so baseball would be the national sport with boxing; I was playing baseball all my life.

“I came to Cork seven years ago because my father is from there and lives there, and I played soccer because Cork didn’t have a baseball team in the past. Then we formed the Munster baseball team. We have a great team, we are having fun all year and we didn’t lose any match. There are Irish guys with a softball background, a few American guys and the Canadaian manager. I feel integrated.”

That Canadian is Eric Kelly, a chiropractor now living on Leeside (the majority of his charges are based in Limerick, where the side play their home ties). Though nursing an injured ankle he’s togged out in his navy and red uniform. His day started early Saturday morning as he packed the car with three bags – one for bats and balls, one for catchers’ mitts and one for helmets. He then picks up a few teammates in Limerick and they set off for Dublin for the last time this season. “The standard is a little bit lower than I’m used to but it’s getting a lot better and we’ve been excellent. It’s not meant to be very competitive and we have a lot of fun every time we go out.”

Now, after the Warriors give up six runs in the third inning, Kelly hobbles to the mound to replace the starting pitcher, an American named Bill, who can clock off till next year. It’s the first time all season that the Warriors have been behind.

When one member of the team feels unwell, one of the replacement players, previously sitting cross legged with a cigarette on a fold-up chair, casually filling in the scorecard is pressed into action. If they are to win this pendant, it’ll be the hard way. When he sets for his very first swing against the Hurricane pitcher, he feels the ball bounce off his head and the umpire tells him to walk to first base. “Hey that’s one way to do it!” Kelly shouts from the bench.

Kieran Manning, though one of the team members with little background in America’s game, is one of the most vociferous players in the diamond. “I’m playing about a year and half. It takes ages to get into it, I’m usually happy to make any kind of contact. You have to accept you’re going to make an arse of yourself most of the time,” he advises.

Not so today. To the acclaim of the teammates behind the cage he darts the ball to centre field with the bases loaded and he manages to round the field with a teammate to tie it up. “So you have played this game before?” he asks an American teammate who greets him at home base after completing his run.

Ultimately, to Kelly’s delight, the Warriors rally and take the win by one run, ensuring they return to Dublin next week to collect their trophy at a special presentation.

For now, they gather at home base for a team picture in the centre of what is affectionately called the Field of Dreams. One-time owner of the LA Dodgers, Irish-American Peter O’Malley stumped up the cash in the 1990s to develop this corner of Corkagh Park in West Dublin.

Updike’s re-telling of Williams’ last homer creaks under the weight of his talent but it’s the picture of the rickety, idiosyncratic ball ground that is the high watermark that the rest are still snorkelling beneath. “Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.”

In Corkagh Park, a long way from Fenway, the pens are painted green, pitchers complain of an uneven mound that causes them to lose balance and runners admit a weariness of the coarse surface that ruthlessly rips their legs when they slide into a plate. But they built it, and they’ll continue to come.

Love the column? Hate the column? Want to suggest an idea for one?
Contact: Adrian.russell@examiner.ie twitter: @adrianrussell

Politico have analysed every word Obama has uttered in a speech, off-the-cuff remark or news conference since taking office.

He’s mentioned “basketball” 33 times, but, tellingly “hockey” only once.

He’s clearly not an NHL fan but amazingly the President has referred to hoops more than “gay” and “abortion” combined.

I can’t find any reference to baseball, American football or soccer. Though I know he certainly spoke about throwing the first pitch at the All Star game last month. In a White Sox jacket. Check it out here.

Last week’s revelation that the Red Sox talisman David Ortiz as well as Manny Ramirez had tested positive for steroid use in 2003, had Boston fans feeling miserable once again.

Ortiz – or Big Pappy, as the baseball-mad city lovingly knew him as – was the heart and soul of the side that broke the so called curse that saw the Red Sox go 86 years without a World Series.

The title victories in 2004 and 2007 are now tainted in many people’s eyes. However, The New York Times, you may have heard of them, ruffled feathers this weekend, arguing that every team had it’s juicers and these wins aren’t diminished by these revelations. It’s worth a look.