Although George promised me that this month’s book would be suited for my trip to Japan, I was unable to locate a copy of St. Agatha’s Breast in the hours leading up to the trip. Alas, I did not have time to finish the book upon my return, so I will review for this month a different book; the one that I did take with me. It is the tale of a high-profile Major League Baseball player who’s come out of the closet with a splash. That is to say, with his photo prominently displayed on the cover of his book.
You may be tempted to think that I am re-reviewing a book already reviewed. No, that was Dave Pallone’s Behind the Mask. This is Billy Bean’s Going the Other Way. They are remarkably similar books in many ways, not the least of which is that they are autobiographies authored by someone other than themselves. This curiosity made me check to see whether it may in fact have been the same author on both books. (They’re not.)
I had hoped that this 2003-written story would at least give a nod to Pallone’s 1990’s book as one of the pioneering efforts by gays to come out in professional sport. He didn’t, and he should have. Not for personal reasons (they may never have met), but because I find it impossible that a gay player with a decade-long window of opportunity would not have known about, read, and been inspired by Behind the Mask. Instead, Bean wants you to think that he’s out front first in this. Shame!
Is the story worth reading? Do you like baseball? The answer to the former depends a bit on the latter, since baseball insiders have trouble making their points without getting heavily into details. I don’t much care for the game itself, I’m sorry to say, so I find myself less than sympathetic with the sad-baseball parts of this tale. I am also unable to empathize with Bean’s loss when, after his career is over, he is no longer able to experience “the crack of bat against ball.”
To be fair, though, I found his more personal losses (his lover Sam who died from AIDS) very touching and real, and I did like some of the more personal glimpses into the world of baseball, like the rookie’s first tour of a major league clubhouse and the way they are shunned in the dugout (for a while) after making their first home run. The story bogs down quite horribly in nostalgia and “what ifs” towards the end, making the plot move along much too slowly.
For the reasons outlined above, the book both works and falls flat. Were I more of a baseball fanatic, I would have remembered Billy Bean as the player I had seen on TV, read about in the papers, and recalled as being quite hunky. This book, thus, would have felt intensely, if not embarrassingly intimate. Imagine Joey Harrington or Kurt Warner or Drew Bledsoe, hunky, dazzling football quarterbacks of whom I recall vividly from the pleasure of looking at them strut their stuff, coming out with (and coming out in) a similar book. I’d be all over that, you can bet on it. OK, I am a bit of a football fanatic.
In the genre of professional sport, books like these fall flat for another, more important reason. A friend of mine once said, “If you hate the job, don’t work there.” I understand why people in professional sport don’t walk away to make a statement of conscience; they know they won’t find another gig that pays as well. OK, that’s show business. Just don’t boo-hoo me, laugh all the way to the bank, and expect me to feel your pain. Sorry!