Hammersmith: A Shakespearian Shortstop

Warning: I decided to try to write the saddest story I could tonight. We’re all locked down, Kate isn’t speaking to me, I miss the dogs, and people are dying horrible deaths while the president calls our governor, Jay Inslee, a politician with more integrity than you'd expect, a snake. Meanwhile the man who stole Georgia’s governorship says he just now realized that someone asymptomatic can transmit the virus. I can’t imagine a worse time in this country, not in my lifetime.

So let’s remember mild Jim Hammersmith. He was a Shakespearian scholar at Auburn University in Alabama, arriving a couple of years after I did. He was a smaller man, even smaller than John Nist, subject of my previous post. He was somehow connected to Milwaukee, as he was a Brewers baseball fan. He died, rather young, only 64 of what I understand to be a heart attack.

I didn’t know him very well. I’ll post a link to his obit at the end; the description of the person there is no one I recognize.

He was single and lonely. I invited him to my house for an evening with some other fellows, but it wasn’t intellectual enough for him, and he never came back. That’s fair. The main presence was Mike Nolan, whose awful jokes about midwestern farmers named Jones and donkeys (see posts dated November 24 and 29) turned Hammersmith off, and quite rightly.

I was dating a tall dark-haired, grey-eyed woman of Danish extraction in the M.A. program. Hammersmith left for parts I don’t recall one summer and asked her to stay at his condo. She did; at the end of the summer, when she was preparing to move out, there was a letter from him that began, “Nah…just stay.”

Poor bastard. I’m so sorry that she showed it to me. She was tall and cold with a quick smile, he was short and rumpled, dumpy, frankly, with perpetually bad hair. His intellectual charm wasn’t immediate. Though they were both scholars, of course, he had no chance with her.

Eventually I left Auburn for law school. After my first year, for some reason, I came back to the department to visit. I’m sure no one was glad to see me. Still, a few tolerated my presumption and spoke with me, asked how it was going, pretended to be glad to see me. At some point, Hammersmith walked up: “I thought we got shut of you,” he said, and I’m sure he meant it jokingly, but it hurt. I mean, a year away, and that’s all he could say?

A couple of years earlier, he had joined our English department softball team. There were actually two: one serious, or pretending to be, and one full of faculty who were way past it, knew it, and were just out for fun. The former team was full of ex-athletes and was loaded for bear. It was this one that Jim joined.

At that, there were, uh, holes: One guy, Dusty, overweight and guided by fantasy, played second and tried repeatedly to take throws at second to make an out and then turn to make a throw to first for a double play. His body got in the way, and his footwork was awful. His throws always bounced in front of the first baseman and bounded away, and the runner took second. I recall Jerry Baxter, whom you may recall (post dated November 18), uncharacteristically lost his cool one afternoon and slammed his glove down.

The Dane usually played shortstop; she was an excellent athlete. I had always been a shortstop, but, slow as I was, I made for a better center fielder than anyone else. But one day, Jim Hammersmith played shortstop.

Someone hit a ball to him, and he braced himself, caught the ball gracefully, pivoted like a shortstop, and threw the ball short of the first baseman’s feet and it bounded away just as Dusty’s did. I immediately glanced at him. He looked puzzled and sad.

I turned away, as it was something of an embarrassing moment. He had represented himself as a real baseball fan, and, though I don’t recall exactly what he said, as a ballplayer. But this throw was so weak and short. OH, I thought, Jim Hammersmith isn’t very good. He’s out here with a bunch of aging athletes, and even at that he can’t measure up.

Fast forward past that visit after I’d gone off to law school and probably five or six years beyond. I was playing left field on a Young Lawyers’ softball team in some league or other in North Carolina. I was 31 or 32. With a runner on second, someone hit a one-hop line drive to me in left field, which I fielded in a great position to make a throw. The runner from second rounded third, and I thought, “Oh you are really going to regret this,” and I fired my throw to the plate.

The third baseman caught it at his waist. I stared at where the ball had ended up, something like sixty feet short of where it was supposed to be. I didn’t get it. What happened?

Many years later, recalling my throw, I got it. Jim Hammersmith had been about the same age that I was when his arm went. I had no idea that it happened like that.

I have a couple of books of fiction about baseball by an old baseball scout, Frank O’Rourke. He’s been dead forever. I loved his books, and, when I was 11 or 12 or so, I wrote him about how I liked his novel Nine Good Men (I still have it; I used to read it and watch “Bull Durham” every spring) and how I had written a baseball book too. He actually wrote back! I wish I still had that letter. He was very sweet, retired in Cape Porpoise, Maine.

Anyway, in one of his stories, a storied outfielder loses it all in one play. (It sounds modeled on Joe DiMaggio.) He goes back to make a catch, then suddenly his body doesn’t feel right, and he loses the ball, and it drops nearby. He’s just lost his ability to play ball, just like that.

When I read the story, I couldn’t believe it could happen like that. There simply had to be some gradual diminishment.

But to this day, I don’t know any better. Perhaps the really elite athlete believes that the ability is never going to go, and manages to fool him or herself until a moment that makes it abundantly clear that, yes, you’re done. I’m not saying that Jim Hammersmith and I were elite athletes; maybe we just didn’t think it could happen, that your body just loses the ability to do what it’s always done.

Now after all these years, I understand, and I believe that explains the bewilderment on Jim Hammersmith’s face. I’m guessing that in the strain of getting his Ph.D., he didn’t have much chance to play anything. Then when he came to Auburn, he thought, sure, I’ll be a shortstop again. But his arm was just gone, and suddenly he realized it. He didn’t come out to play with us again. As an athlete, he realized that he was done, already resting in peace.

http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/james-p-hammersmith-1949-2013.html

Jim Hammersmith