Roger Kahn - The Boys of Summer (1972)

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You may glory in a team triumphant, but you will fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he was a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it.

Roger Kahn
Defeat, particularly dramatic defeat, confirms our worst impression of ourselves.

Roger Kahn
Robinson did not merely play at center stage. He was center stage; and wherever he walked, center stage moved with him.

Roger Kahn
To age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man.

Roger Kahn
No game is as verbal as baseball; baseball spreads twenty minutes of action across three hours of a day.

Roger Kahn
I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.

Roger Kahn
What did it matter, Babe Ruth or Jersey Joe Stripp? If vector analysis was beyond me, I could still watch a ball game.

Roger Kahn
Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?"

Roger Kahn
Baseball skill relates inversely to age. The older a man gets, the better a ball player he was when young, according to the watery eye of memory.

Roger Kahn
I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?

Roger Kahn
The gracious mistress turned bitch in summer heat.

Roger Kahn
The world is never again as it was before anyone you love has ever died; never so innocent, never so fixed, never so gentle, never so pliant to your will. But these are afterthoughts. Generations vie and the young recover swiftly, or believe they do.

Roger Kahn
At a point of life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.

Roger Kahn
It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent.

Roger Kahn
When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment. It was astonishing, to hear cheers from a major league crowd while sitting at home.

Roger Kahn
At carefree times in early boyhood I chose to believe that life was a kind of ball game, but with a mix of years and perception I learned better.

Roger Kahn
There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons.

Roger Kahn
In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy you were in the game.

Roger Kahn
One can travel for weeks with baseball men and see no books at all.

Roger Kahn
The immeasurable difference between producing cars and producing newspapers is pursuit of the horizon.

Roger Kahn
It was a fine thing to be a newspaperman and I very much wanted to be a good one.

Roger Kahn
In the dead sunlight of a forgotten spring the major leaguers were trim, graceful and effortless. They might have been gods for these seemed true Olympians to a boy who wanted to become a manand who sensed that it was an exalted manly thing to catch a ball with one hand thrust across your body and make a crowd leap to its feet and cheer.

Roger Kahn
One did not go to Ebbets Field for sociology. Exciting baseball was the attraction, and a wonder of the sociological Brookln Dodgers was the excitement of their play.

Roger Kahn
Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no lomger hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.

Roger Kahn
That morning began with wind and hairy clouds. It was late March and the day rose brisk and uncertain, with gusts suggesting January and flashes of sun promising June. In every way, a season of change had come.

Roger Kahn