Bethlehem Says

That’s what a “kibitz” is, according to Google image search. Here’s an excerpt from what it means, on GQ.com, when it’s David Roth and I gettin’ deep about the NBA Playoffs:

Shoals: You know how they say “all politics are local?” Well, all Bulls ads are local.

Roth: The thing with Rose, if I can put on my Brand Manager Cap (it has earflaps!) for a moment, is that the Chicago connection works for him. LeBron is from no-place at this point. Spiritually, he has apparently always been from a gated community near Miami. I think you’re right that the thing that works about the Rose commercial, and maybe doesn’t work for you about Rose, is that he seems to mean it—it feels like he cares because I guess he’s repping his stuff. All the best sneaker commercials have that. There was a Melo one in Baltimore I remember really well that way, with a creepy cameo by a nodding Jim Boeheim.

Shoals: “His stuff”. That sounds like you are saying he’s earnest about his balls.

Next week, the Finals!

When I was in sixth grade, my parents took us to Appalachia for a vacation. An older couple they knew, maybe UNC faculty, had retired there to open a bed and breakfast. I was surprised to find a leafy state park, and not a tooth-strewn coal pit, which I guess was pretty bad of me. It was pleasant, maybe a little cold. Also the man, Lauren, was one of the first people with a hearing aid I was around for more than a few minutes. He was built like something gruff from Tolkien and walked everywhere to help, or in spite of, heart problems.

Those were the glory days of Shoals and ancient baseball, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I try and write a book that will break me out of the basketball ghetto (no offense, zealots). A few days into the trip, Lauren asked me if I wanted to meet Billy Klaus, a journeyman infielder who played in the majors from 1952-1963. Klaus, who after a few years in Japan had opened an antique shop in nearby Valle Crucis, NC. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to do—was I supposed to ask Klaus about his career, or the more famous peers I actually gave a damn about.

There was a lot of wood in his shop; I remember it looking a lot like a 1962 Topps card, and later made a point of tracking his down as an temporally displaced souvenir. Klaus made small talk with my father and Lauren at first, before I was introduced to him as a big baseball fan. He was impressed that I knew who he was, sort of, and courteously, if rotely, answered the adults’ leading questions about his career. Everyone was trying very hard to be polite, which for some reason involved no one showing much interest in baseball.

Then, suddenly and purposefully, Lauren said to Klaus, “Billy, tell them about the Ted Williams home run”. Klaus perked up some; this was his shtick, and even if he didn’t want to reminisce about the game for hours on end, he knew that this one came with the territory of semi-famous local attraction with a business to keep going. The home run in question was the Ted Williams home run, the one he hit off of Baltimore’s Jack Fisher with the last at-bat of his career. Klaus was with the Orioles that game, but had spent the previous four seasons WIlliams’s teammate on the Red Sox. He’s mentioned in the final paragraph of Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” for having committed a late-game error that allows the Red Sox to pull out a win. I nodded my head obediently as Klaus set the scene, expecting to hear a familiar story from a primary source—worth something, I guess, but hardly worth all that time spent in an antique store (I was 11, remember).

That’s when Klaus injected himself into the narrative, simply and bracingly.

“I was playing shortstop. Ted came up. Fisher threw a ball, then got him swinging. I knew it was probably his last time up, and he was retiring, so when Fisher turned my way I said ‘Throw him something good’. And he hit it out of the park.”

Klaus didn’t gloat over claiming his place in history, or take much notice of our reactions. This was serious conspiracy-theory, myth-puncturing stuff, but it may also have been an old-timey ballplayer’s gimmick, or the tendency of memory to embellish itself. He had probably wanted Williams to hit a home run; maybe he wasn’t going to hurt his team’s chances at the time, but why not help him out after the fact? Maybe he had a drinking problem. I let out a “wow, really?” and Klaus nodded his head. Neither Lauren, who had heard it before, nor my father seemed much impressed. I think on the way back, my father expressed some skepticism, even some cynicism about Klaus trying to make his customers happy. Then again, Klaus did have at least one very good season. As a rookie, he finished second in the ROY voting only to doomed phenom Herb Score. This highly improbable tale, a fifteen minutes already that came to us faded and bleached of credulity, didn’t have to be his legacy.

On the ride home, I figured it didn’t matter one way or the other. Ultimately, it undermined Williams, and made Klaus important, which was a drag. No one would ever believe me if I repeated it. And I was years away from finding out that the Great Man theory almost never passes muster. So I looked out the window and moved on. A few months ago, when I thought about that day for the first time in years, I at first told a friend I had met Claude Osteen.

My apologies if everybody’s heard this story before.