Weiss Up

Some unsporting reflections:

On the other coast, Charles O. Finley is trying to get it on with Alvin Dark again after a six-year estrangement. From here it looks like the beginning of another beautiful love/hate relationship. The South did not let Alvin into the world without leaving its stamp on the boy; he may lack Charles's sense of the Barnumesque, but his candor is just as notorious. I give the first round to Charles just for getting Alvin to step into Kangaroo shoes. But the last laugh is on Charles too: even Alvin's presence don't make the A's more than a dark horse to take the Orioles for the pennant.

Alvin made the big time for the Boston Braves at shortstop in 1948, taking the rookie of the year (then for both leagues) with a .322 average. Alvin was tight with second baseman Eddie Stanky and both of them went to the Giants, who took the pennant in 1951.

Alvin's old-school brand of charm is a welcome change from the modish mustachio of Dick Williams. He spent a lot of time under Leo Durocher for the Giants, and emerged in his own right as a manager for "Frisco in 1962-64. He took over Finley's Kansas City Athletics in 1966 and broke with Charles in 1968, whereupon he flew to the Indians. Alvin never got along that well with management, and GM Gabe Paul ousted him in 1970. He reminds me a lot of Hank Bauer, the crusty if effective skipper of the O's in the mid-60s.

Alvin may be a character, but a return to the Dark Ages has its drawbacks. Alvin is famous for saying, after the seventh game of the 1963 Series when his Giants fell to the Yankees, 1-0, that black and Latin American players can't hit in the clutch. Reggie Jackson, who emerged under Alvin's tutelage in the late-60s, says the man has the right kind of mind for baseball, but the man's allegedly dictatorial and racist attitude towards Orlando Cepeda certainly hobbled the Baby Cull during his early years.

In these climes, though, the diamonds are iced over, and baseball-mongers must stay indoors drumming things with their hands. Some play squash and others play handball and now I want to talk about the difference between the two.

Squash, I was once told, was developed by long-of-tooth monks who sublimated the vestiges of their earthly desires by slamming a little black ball with a racket against a wall. Now it is played by preppies in white shorts.

Once a lad from Exeter ventured to ask me, Where did Handball originate? Why, I said, the most neolithic of our ancestors could hardly have resisted the impulse to bounce the nearest spheroid off the nearest rock face. If you had given him a racket, he would have burned it.

But squash is different. Squash players still play with rackets, and I am told they don't even sweat. Handball is much more honest.

Yet, how Harvard compromises the artist. We handball players must spurn the ivied walls and swat out our existences in sterile squash courts.