It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of the 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.
- John Updike in the 10/22/1960 New Yorker*, witnessing Ted Williams’ final at-bat
A bit further on, Updike writes something that Aaron Carroll’s post about endings surely primed me to notice:
Every true story has an anticlimax. The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent in the smoke of Williams’ miracle.
———————————-
* Updike’s piece is behind the magazine’s paywall. I put the link up for subscribers, who have access. My Kindle subscription doesn’t give me access. Click here and scroll down for a longer excerpt that would have denied me the pleasure of typing out Updike’s words. I read the piece in a library copy of The Only Game In Town: Sportswriting From The New Yorker. You can buy an ebook version here and support my great neighborhood bookstore, which doesn’t know I’m doing this and certainly isn’t paying me to put up the link.
=============
UPDATE (1:52 p.m.): Everything I read today seems determined to dance with Aaron’s post, which hinges on a Stephen King ending. This is from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:
In horror fiction, the monster often threatens a comeback in a coda at the end: not truly defeated at all but only waiting for the sequel. Descartes did not want sequels. He thought he had covered up the abyss forever, but he had not; his reassuring ending fell to pieces almost at once.
