My late father, who suffered a lifelong passion for the Chicago Cubs and passed the affliction to his three sons, liked to tell this story: When I was 10 or so, I'd been out for the day and hadn't followed my usual summer routine of listening to the Cubs game. Returning home, I asked Dad what had happened. “Ugh. They lost, 11-1,” he growled. My face fell, but immediately brightened with hope. “How'd they score the one run?” I asked.
I was hoping, of course, that Ernie Banks had hit another home run—the lone solace for countless Cubs fans through the wilderness years that stretched over the Banks era of the 1950s and 1960s (and continued for decades after Banks retired). Banks was one of the great players of the game: His 512 career home runs and two MVP awards put him in a select circle. But for most of his career, Banks was surrounded by mediocrity or worse. Ernie was all there was. Toward the end, when a number of strong players joined him in the lineup, the team suffered a humiliating collapse in 1969 and lost the NL East Division title to the surging New York Mets, a team that didn't even exist until Banks had been in the league nine years.
Throughout that long run of despair, Banks stayed famously upbeat—every day was sunny, every setback was trivial, every season was promising. His mantra became “Let's play two,” adopted now as the title to an admirable biography by the veteran Chicago sports journalist Ron Rapoport, who was collaborating with Banks on an autobiography until Banks backed out in the years before he died.
Though Banks was revered in Chicago by everyone except sometime manager Leo Durocher, I suspect few fans really believed he was quite the unrelenting optimist he played. For one thing, even children recognized that life carried harsh realities—just look at the performance of the Cubs. For another, Banks was no fool, and no thinking human being remains implacably happy.
Mr. Rapoport works diligently to penetrate the curtain of enthusiasm in which Banks wrapped himself. And if the mystery of the man inside never quite gets solved, “Let's Play Two” at least offers several facts and observations that part the curtain slightly. Banks was so tormented by never playing in the World Series that he once saw a psychiatrist. With the Cubs on the road, he rarely mingled with his teammates off the field. “I always appreciated his outward presence of loving life and loving the Cubs,” Don Kessinger, a classy Cubs shortstop, told Mr. Rapoport, “but I always thought there was a side to Ernie that most of us never got a chance to be a part of.”
Read Full Article »
