The Boys of Summer

"I don’t think there’s any question that The Boys of Summer has always been larger than a baseball book. On the surface, at least, it’s about the 1952, 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers – their triumphs and their inevitable failings. They were good enough to get to the World Series, but not good enough to win. But they were a great team, and Jackie Robinson is a prominent part both of the story of the book, and of the team as a player. But it’s so much larger than that, because it’s really a story about Roger Kahn and his father. The first half of the book is written somewhat chronologically, about those two seasons, and Roger Kahn’s own place in them. He was a young reporter, just learning how to become a writer, and all of this was happening around him. Then, in the second half of the book, he goes back and revisits the players 20 or so years later. There’s real depth in every element of the book, to my mind, as a reader. It touches on things that are much larger than sports. Yes. I’ve heard Roger Kahn say that the quintessential story of sport is the fact that great athletes die two deaths. They die the first death when they no longer play their sport, and then they also die, of course, like all of us do. Their second death is, in many cases, much much later. Roger Kahn goes back to see Jackie Robinson, who was this extraordinary lion of a player – but at the end, by the time he sees him, is having troubles with his son. He’s come crosswinds a bit with the civil rights movement. And Jackie Robinson is one of the players on that team who died young as well. So there is this tremendous bittersweet nature to the book, which is a big part of it. There’s a humanity to the book. There’s this exciting baseball part in the first half and then this bittersweet part of it in the second half that is, in many ways, even more touching. They do in many ways. One is working in a bar; one is working in construction. (This wouldn’t necessarily be the case today, since baseball players make so much more money.) But in other ways they were almost heroic. They had this glorious past and now they’ve come back into society, into civilisation. It’s really very interesting to see how these great players are now living their lives. Some are living it with more success than others. But that effort to try to be ‘normal’ – for lack of a better word – I found to be really touching. I didn’t find it to be heartbreaking at all."