Jack Kerouac’s brief stint as a running back for Columbia University and early crack at sportswriting for the school’s Daily Spectator have been well documented. Unknown ’til now, however, was Kerouac’s obsession with a self-invented fantasy baseball universe. The Lowell, MA native “charted the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks),” explains the New York Times’ Charles McGrath.
He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.
All these œpublications, some typed, some handwritten and often pasted into old-fashioned composition notebooks, are now part of the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The curator, Isaac Gewirtz, has just written a 75-page book about them, œKerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, to be published next week by the library and available, at least for now, only in its gift shop.
The prose in Kerouac™s various publications mostly imitates the overheated, epithet-studded sportswriting of the day. œIt was partly homage, Mr. Gewirtz said, œand perhaps partly parody, but every now and then an original phrase leaps out. For example, the description of a hitter who œalmost drove Charley Fiskell, Boston™s hot corner man, into a shambled heap in the last game with his sizzling drives through the grass.
Mr. Gewirtz said, œI really like that ˜shambled heap.™ Another description he enjoys is one of an overpowering pitcher who after defeating the opposition by a lopsided score œsmiled wanly.
i had to go to his grave on a field trip when i was in 7th grade, felt like a burden. stupid fucking kids…
I used to have a made-up baseball league when I was a kid. But then I confromed. Man, do I ever feel like a square.
One of the oddest conversations I ever had in my life was with Ed McMahon from “The Tonight Show.” I met him only once thru a guy a I worked with, and we talked about his high school days because I heard he and Jack Kerouac were in the same class. True, it turns out, and they used to go drinking all the time before WW II. The had a mutual friend they used to hang out with, who died in the war. They lost contact after that, but the idea of Ed and Kerouac, who both maintained their side of the drinking in their corners of the world, is one of those odd pairings in life. I hope to turn my theory that Ed, not Neal Cassidy, is the inspiration for “On the Road,” into my first dissertation. I may even go back to school just to write it.