Fathers Playing Catch with Sons

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their own athletic love affairs - Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume, once again available, collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball (his favorite) but extending to basketball ("coming up fast on the inside"), football, and ping-pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how games bind people together, bridging generations. The whole is a kind of lyrical hymn, a loving reflection on the metaphor sport provides us through its tradition, grace, and seeming timelessness.