HURETTA, BASEBALL, AND LIFE

.......Sweet Huretta Davis did countless good deeds during her long and productive life, but her greatest, her kindest, her most glorious good deed was to assist Red Sox Nation this past fall in the winning of the World Series. She was but a young lass when the Sox last won in 1918, but clearly she must have known, even in Chattanooga, how desperate we were for a victory. She would commiserate with me every year we came close: 1975, 1978, 1986, 2003. As a lifelong sports fan she understood the pain, the doubt, the anguish, the fatalism, the madness of just knowing that defeat in some hideous form would dash our brave hopes.

..... This year, she told me, “Jeanie honey, you send me a Red Sox cap, and I guarantee a victory!” Of course, I was late getting to the post office and missed some of the sweep against the Angels, but she told me not to fret--she would be wearing the hat for the encounter with the Evil Empire and all would be well. By the end of game 3, a 19-8 shellacking of our beloved Idiots that put us down by 3 games, I began to feel that even Huretta could not secure us a victory. But Huretta herself was undaunted, as she was by everything in this world. She said, “Honey, I’ve put that cap on top of the television, and I just know it will start working.” Our son Peter (a huge Huretta fan) and I went to game 4 against the Yankees in funereal garb, certain that we would witness the inevitable,the tragic sweep. Awash in melancholy and self-pity, I still mentioned to Peter before the first pitch, that Huretta had our back, that Huretta had promised a victory, that Huretta had the magic hat perched on her TV. Peter was comforted, and when the game finally ended at 1:30 a.m. with a stupendous homerun by David Ortiz, Peter turned to me and said, “I worship Huretta!” We won 7 more games after that, and when I called Nancy and Huretta after the final out of the Series, Huretta whooped, “I told you so!”

......Huretta’s passion for baseball drew me to her from the beginning. Because of her extraordinarily warm and generous spirit, she knew intuitively that baseball was all about coming home, in every sense of the word. In baseball, the journey begins and ends at home, if we are lucky, if we can negotiate the dangers that would cut us down as we round first and head to second, then third, then home to reunite with our teammates. Former Yale professor and Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti reminds us that this journey from home to home is a narrative that mirrors life, “an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunion.” Huretta was, for so many of us here, the essence of home, the essence of reunion and renewal and hope. We counted on her to remind us that there was always a chance, always one more inning in which we could salvage all we had lost. Her joy, her resilience, her belief that baseball was the best game ever invented helped us “keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive” even during the winter. Huretta was our eternal spring, and I can imagine her, even as we speak, sidling up to Ted Williams in heaven and engaging him on the subject of whether it just might be time for the Chicago Cubs to win one.

Jeanie Goddard
January 22, 2005