The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  ACCLAIM FOR GEORGE PLIMPTON AND THE CURIOUS CASE OF SIDD FINCH

  "Plimpton, the professional amateur, the dashing public hero, is first and best a writer."

  -The New Yorker

  "A wonderful book. Everyone will love it."

  -USA Today

  "Elegant ... unique ... a funny, knowing and poignant first novel that, like the split-fingered fastball, moves in ways finally astonishing to behold.... A strike."

  -A. Bartlett Giamatti, New York Times Book Review

  "Wild, surprising, hilarious ... a work that reflects the magic of the game itself."

  -St. Petersburg Times

  "Wonderfully wry and whimsical."

  -Los Angeles Times

  "Engangingly fanciful ... Plimpton's good-natured spoof of baseball fable and foibles is written with flair, high spirits, and consummate skill."

  -Booklist

  "Lively... charming... a terrific character."

  -Chicago Tribune

  "Not only entertaining; it offers further, deeper insights into a type of American experience as well."

  -Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

  GEORGE PLIMPTON

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF SIDD FINCH

  George Plimpton was the founder and editor of The Paris Review, where for more than fifty years he tirelessly championed new writers and the craft of writing. He was also a pioneer of participatory journalism, a humorist, and, on occasion, an actor. His numerous bestsellers include Paper Lion, Out of My League, and The Bogey Man. He died in 2003.

  THE CURIOUS CASE OF

  SIDD FINCH

  A NOVEL

  GEORGE PLIMPTON

  PREFACE BY JONATHAN AMES

  Preface

  When I have insomnia, I play out in my mind wonderful fantasies. But I should qualify something-they are not erotic these reveries, they are heroic, though that's not to say that erotic fantasies can't be heroic for those of you who go in for that sort of thing.

  My insomnia-fantasies fall into three categories:

  (1) Baseball prowess/heroics.

  (2) Basketball prowess/heroics.

  (3) General heroism.

  a) Saving a woman.

  b) Saving a small child or several small children from a burning building.

  The baseball fantasy goes like this: One day I wake up with great strength and wildly heightened reflexes, but I don't know this. I'm sort of like Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, but much more positive. The day I awaken with my superpowers, I happen to go to the batting cage at Coney Island (I live in New York City) for some amusement. I step into the fifty mph cage, my usual speed, and I crush every ball. Sensing that something is up, I venture into the seventy-five mph cage and again crush every ball. I then go into the ninety mph cage and it's like the machine is pitching softballs. I hit a batting-cage home run every time.

  The fantasy then fast-forwards to my getting a tryout with the Yankees, even though I'm thirty-nine years old, weigh 150 pounds-all of which is meagerly distributed on a six-foot frame-and last played organized baseball in the ninth grade. From the tryout, which leaves the Yankees scouts and coaching staff absolutely astounded, I make the team as a pinch hitter, and eventually-well, rather quickly-earn a regular spot in the lineup. I then mentally compile my statistics for the season, though it's hard to not allow myself to hit 1.000. But I want to keep things fairly realistic, so I merely hit .412 with 58 home runs and 195 RBIs, thinking that such numbers are beautiful, it being the nature of a baseball fan to find numbers and statistics beautiful. If you'll notice, I humbly only break the all-time single-season RBI record, previously held by Hack Wilson, because I don't want to make a mockery of the game and be that much superior to my peers, though of course I am the first person to hit .400 since Ted Williams.

  Even though this is a preface to a baseball book, I do have to admit I somewhat prefer my basketball fantasy to my baseball fantasy, because I delusionally feel that it is within the realm of the possible. I never was a very good baseball player-my career Little League average is less than half my fantasy average, about .190, I'd guess-but I am a fairly good basketball player, if I may say so. I'm in possession of a better-than-average jump shot, and this makes the basketball fantasy nearly believable, at least at four o'clock in the morning when I can't sleep.

  The way the fantasy works is this: I begin to take yoga classes and in doing so, some kind of life-energy is released from my perpetually stiff lower back and absolutely inflexible hamstrings, which are more like ham-ropes. So the yoga transforms me and I go out to my local playground court and find that I can dunk. I then get a tryout with the New York Knicks and they're amazed to see an unknown middle-aged novelist jump like a young Michael Jordan. I make the team and we win the championship, with me dunking the winning basket over two, maybe three defend ers. An added bonus to the basketball fantasy is that my shiny head, which I shave because of my balding, fits in perfectly with the preferred hairstyle of my fellow NBA'ers, and so my hair loss is no longer a source of shame for me.

  Compared to my exploits in the sports world, my general heroic fantasies are pretty standard stuff. I walk past a burning house, dash into it and carry out many children, maybe a whole orphanage. Then I'm hospitalized with smoke inhalation and the next day a picture of me in my hospital bed is on the front page of the New York Post with the headline: HERO!

  Or I'm walking home one day and I hear a scream. I dash into an apartment-building vestibule and discover a man terrorizing a woman. But before the man is able to do anything, I have arrived on the scene and engage in an epic battle with the marauder, who is absolutely enormous and fearsome. During our fight, he stabs me, but I'm able to knock him out and then tie him up until the police arrive. The woman, who looks like Grace Kelly at the zenith of her beauty, is incredibly grateful and holds me in her arms while I bleed profusely from my wound. I lose a lot of blood and I'm rushed to the hospital, where I nearly die, but I pull through. The mayor of New York visits me in the hospital and the headline in the Post reads: WRITER SAVES WOMAN! I then sometimes indulge myself with the idea that my book sales will greatly increase after my heroic deed and the subsequent press coverage; I also like to think that maybe I get a tough-guy scar on my cheek from the fight.

  Well, enough with my fantasies. I've only laid this out for you to show you that I have specific psychological insight as to how and why George Plimpton created the marvelous character Sidd Finch, whom you're about to encounter in this splendid book and who is possibly the greatest pitcher of all time, real or imagined. You see, George wanted to be Sidd Finch, in the same way that all these years, I've wanted to break Hack Wilson's RBI record. He dreamed of being Sidd Finch. He says as much in his first baseball book (and his first book), Out of My League:

  ...I began to be plagued by those half-forgotten boyhood dreams of heroics on the major league baseball diamonds, so many of them flooding my mind...

  So, plagued by these stirred-up dreams, George Plimpton, in 1960, went to his editor at Sports Illustrated and pitched the idea (so to speak) that he should take the mound against major leaguers in an all-star game and then write about it. Here's the dialogue of George's pitch to his editor, Sid James, as George reported it in Out of My League:

  "I pitched at school," I told him, "and at college a bit, and once or twice in the army. But the point is," I went on, "that I would pitch not as a hotshot-that'd be a different story-but as a guy who's average, really, a sort of Mr. Everybody, the sort who thinks he's a fair athlete, a good tennis player, but always finds himself put out in the second round of the club tournament by the sandy-haired member who wears a hearing-aid."

  "I see," he said.

 
There was a leather sofa behind me and I sat down in it. `James Thurber," I said obliquely, "once wrote that the majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees. That's my fellow, you see, lying there staring at the bedroom ceiling... the bases loaded, and he's imagining himself coming in from the bullpen.... "

  Don't let George's displacement about the "American male" and "that's my fellow" throw you off; he's also the American male who stared at his ceiling, fantasizing. George Plimpton was a college pitcher who continued to dream, long after college was over, of pitching greatness. And so was born, I contend, the character of Sidd Finchborn on the screen of a bedroom ceiling, long before the character actually came to the page.

  Another of my brilliant theories is that George made Finch a Buddhist monk-in-training-it's his Buddhist practices that give Finch his great pitching abilities-because George must have imagined that he himself could somehow be a great pitcher if he just meditated correctly. It's like my yoga fantasy. I think we come up with such notions because we realize that our bodies will never be able to do the things we'd like, but if somehow we could bypass the body through the spirit, then the Jonathan Ameses of the world could dunk, and the George Plimptons/Sidd Finches of the world could strike out the Yankees, could strike out the world!

  I think, too, that maybe George made Finch a Buddhist because he himself was perhaps a fledgling Buddhist, which may come as a surprise to the people who saw George presiding over Paris Review parties in his blue blazer, since one doesn't usually associate blue blazers with Buddhism. But I think this might be the case since George certainly was living proof of one of the Buddhist mantras in this wonderful novel. It is a mantra which is meant to help with writer's block and goes like this: Om Ara Ba Tsa Na Dhi. It means: living ripens verbal intelligence. Sidd Finch prescribes this mantra to Robert Temple, the narrator of The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, who, naturally, suffers from writer's block. Well, if there ever was an example that living ripens verbal intelligence, it was George Plimpton. He was so curious, so amused, so alive, so enchanted by the whimsical and the absurd and the fantastic, that all of this came bursting out in his incredible writing with its inimitable mix of the comedic and the graceful.

  To further plunder this Buddhist-spiritual theme, I'd venture to say that George Plimpton was practically enlightened, or rather he was literally enlightened-the fellow, this extraordinary Mr. Everybody, seemed to glow. If he was present in a room you spotted him immediately and your eye was drawn to him-his silver hair ("silver mop" might be the better description) was a beacon, you couldn't miss it, it was everywhere, like the smile of the Mona Lisa. And should you come face-to-face with the man, there was pouring out of George a generosity of spirit that was so great that it seemed to have a physical quality: light. Jack Kerouac gives a description in On the Road of the kind of people he was wild for, and I think it's the perfect depiction of George, especially considering George's great love of fireworks:

  ... the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes `Awww!"

  That was my experience when I met George: I was in awe and I said, "Awww!" Shaking his hand was like shaking the hand of literature in the twentieth century. I met him in the spring of 1999 at a storytelling performance in which we were both involved, and to my surprise he had read some of my essays, though I don't think he was aware that for a few years I had been calling myself "the George Plimpton of the colon." I had given myself this sobriquet because I had gone for a colonic with the sole purpose of writing about it. But then in the fall of 1999, a few months after meeting George, I pursued something a bit more Plimptonesque: I had an amateur boxing match. When I started training for the fight, part of my regimen was to read George's Shadowbox, which is his memoir about his famous encounter in the ring with the light heavyweight Archie Moore.

  Well, I broke my nose while sparring nine days before my fight, but still went through with the thing and had it rebroken in the second round. But to my credit I lasted all four scheduled rounds, though I lost the fight. A few days after the bout, I went to one of George's Paris Review parties that he held in his home and I showed off to him my fractured nose and two black eyes. He very much approved, and was happy that an Ames had entered the ring, and was going to report as much to that side of his family. We were not related, but George's mother was an Ames. His middle name was Ames.

  George also approved, I think, of the fact that I lost. Winning is good for fantasies and late night insomnia, but losing is good for writing-it's more interesting, more humorous, more human. And being good at losing was one of George's many gifts. He had the bearing of General MacArthur, but the soul of Charlie Chaplin. He was wildly brave and intrepid, fearless really, but he was also gleefully self-deprecating at the same time. So he liked the fact that I had broken my nose in defeat. Archie Moore, after all, had broken George's nose.

  A few weeks after that Paris Review party I went to Cuba. In Shadowbox, George wrote several memorable passages about being in Havana with Hemingway. He describes going to Hemingway's favorite bar, the Floridita, where Papa (how George referred to him) sat in the corner with a bust of his own likeness behind him and how talking to Papa there was a strange double-fold encounter. He also reported about the time he brought Tennessee Williams to the Floridita to meet Papa, but the meeting had been awkward-Hemingway didn't know what to make of Williams. So I went to that bar and sat near the corner, which is now roped off to protect that bust of Hemingway, and I imagined George and Hemingway and Williams sitting there. I pretended to be in the past. I liked it in the past.

  Then I went to Hemingway's house where George had written about having drinks with Hemingway on the patio. Papa had thrown a punch at him after challenging George to spar by saying, "Let's see how good you are." So as I looked at Hemingway's patio, I pictured George there. Young and tall and handsome. I saw him, in my mind, taking on the side of his head Papa's left hook. It would have been bad manners not to let the great man hit him.

  When I've traveled over the years, I've gone to Venice looking for Thomas Mann, to Spain for Hemingway, to Berlin for Isherwood, to Denver for Kerouac, to Big Sur for Miller. And in Cuba I went looking for George Plimpton. But I never told George that, and I regret this. It would have been a way to let him know how much I admired him, how much I worshipped him, how much I adored him. But one rarely says these sorts of things, though I wish I had. I should mention that I never found any of those writers when I went looking for them, and I didn't really find George in Cuba, but I did find him in New York, and for that I will always be grateful.

  -JONATHAN AMES

  January 2004

  Introduction

  The publishers have made the mistake of calling this book a novel. It is not, of course, as anyone who turns the pages will realize. A chronicle might be a more apt description-since it details the career in the National League of the Buddhist scholar, Sidd Finch, who caused a considerable and memorable stir during the 1985 baseball season. The author, Robert Temple, whom I barely know, has asked me to write a short introductory note to his book. I am flattered to be asked. As only a part-time viewer of baseball-though I have a deep affection for the game-I know that other authorities from the sports media are far more qualified to put Temple's opus, and thus Finch's impact on the game, in a proper perspective.

  I suspect I was asked because I wrote the first piece on Sidd Finch that attracted public attention. In mid-winter 1985 Mark Mulvoy, the editor of Sports Illustrated, called me in to offer me two projects. One was to follow up on a report about a Japanese distance runner in the London Marathon who, newly arrived there, had apparently got things confused and thought he was to run not for twentysix mile
s but for twenty-six days. He had disappeared into the English countryside. According to the story, which appeared in the London Observer, his wife had called from Osaka, worried; she had commented on her husband's determination. He had been spotted running by a petrol station in East Anglia, etc.

  "What's the other one?" I asked Mulvoy.

  He began describing the rumors drifting up from Florida about a superphenom pitcher-"We think he's a converted cricket-bowler from Pakistan"-who had turned up in the Mets training camp in St. Petersburg. That was the story I picked. The "cricket-bowler" turned out to be Sidd Finch.

  Because of various deadlines ("We must get this in by the April First issue"), my piece ended with the question still unresolved whether Sidd Finch, who indeed was possessed of the most wondrous arm in baseball history, would actually ever play in the big leagues. In retrospect, I wish Mulvoy had been a lot more patient. Or at least allowed me to follow up on the story when it became evident there was much more to come.

  In any case, Robert Temple has picked up the cudgel. His book provides many of the answers we would like to know. By all accounts Sidd Finch is a terribly shy bird. Temple got to know him. So that was fortuitous.

  I never actually saw Sidd Finch pitch that summer. At the time I was in the Orient looking at firework factories and preparing a book called Fireworks: A History and Celebration which I might suggest (in passing) even the layman will find of interest. Indeed, on August 5th, 1985, an extraordinary day in baseball history-the day Finch first pitched in the majors-I was recovering from watching a million-dollar fireworks show put on just outside the little Japanese town of Tondabayashi. Both events, on opposite sides of the world, paralleled each other as galvanic happenings.

  Osaka is only thirty miles from Tondabayashi. If I'd had my wits about me I could have moseyed around Osaka to find out whatever happened to the Japanese marathon runner who disappeared into the English countryside. It is not good practice to let these opportunities slip by.