Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
“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.”
That’s how John Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” begins. One of the best works of sports writing by someone not a sportswriter, it is also one of the most lasting and memorable 20th century essays. Yet until recently you had to look for it in the long-out-of-print collection Assorted Prose (or else online).
Chris Carduff, my good friend for more than thirty years, and a consulting editor at the Library of America, has brought out “Hub Fans” in a beautifully produced little volume of its own, and he writes about it in the Huffington Post. The book is a moving goodbye not only to its subject, Ted Williams, but to Updike himself, who died only days after writing the introduction.
Boston-area residents, Updike fans, baseball fans, and fans of good writing should all find something to enjoy in it, and with its modest price (no more than many paperbacks now sell for), it makes a fine present.
