Finding truth beyond the box score
Praying for Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family's Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers
By Thomas Oliphant
St. Martin's, 288 pp., illustrated, $24.95
Outsiders do not understand why seemingly rational people can become despondent and/or exultant over a baseball team. Consider this familiar story: After many failures, a team defeats its longtime nemesis, the New York Yankees, in a postseason game -- and does so at Yankee Stadium. This team, after painful near-misses, wins a World Series for the first time in decades. Grown men weep, a region celebrates, and lives are redefined.
In ''Praying for Gil Hodges," Thomas Oliphant is writing not about the 2004 Boston Red Sox, but the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, who that year beat the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series.
In this memoir, Oliphant -- a longtime Globe reporter and political columnist -- shows why such moments can matter beyond sports, and why a box score cannot always contain the truth of a ballgame. That truth emerges from the confluence of a team, a neighborhood, and a family, as Oliphant combines his skills as reporter (the objective recorder of facts) and columnist (the passionate arguer of subjective truths).
The magnitude of the book's central event, the seventh game of the 1955 World Series, is underscored when Oliphant's parents urge their son to stay home from fifth grade to watch the game on television with his father. (His mother will watch at the law firm where she is a secretary.)
Oliphant's parents come across as smart, loving, and quietly noble, a mom and dad who know how and when to give their child either a break (like that day of hooky) or a gentle push. One such push occurs when they secure a scholarship for him to a private school in Manhattan, and another when they encourage their son toward a paying job in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera.
The Oliphants had their struggles, due to illnesses that Oliphant's father contracted during World War II. The father suffers physically, the family financially. Yet while the author refers to ''the mixed, happy-tough picture of our lives," the story's mood and tone are positive. One reason is the parents' belief that championing justice and equality can help make better lives for people who have less than they do. Another is the presence of their beloved Dodgers, serving as a unifying hope for brighter days.
The Dodgers bring the family together in a shared purpose and diversion, combining the sheer fun of baseball with the power of the team as a symbol of both persistence and justice: persistence from the team's resilience in the face of repeated failures, and justice as the first integrated major league team (when Jackie Robinson joins the Dodgers in 1947). Father and son's favorite Dodger is Gil Hodges, like the father an Indiana native, and to both of them a model of strong moral character -- the same moral character that Oliphant recognizes in his parents.
And so the 1955 World Series takes on added meaning. The Yankees (with just one black player in 1955) are the status quo haves, the Dodgers the perennial have-nots. The author maintains that the Dodgers, as examples of ''the hard-luck underdog [who] is deeply etched in American myth and more than one American reality," are therefore ''America's Team." One could argue that neither the Dodgers nor the Yankees alone symbolize the United States, and that Oliphant himself has already ventured out of the ''have-not" realm, with his private-school education and opera job.
Any memoir writer is blessed or cursed with the life he or she has lived, and in this sense Oliphant is fortunate to have grown up a fan of the Dodgers with all their history and drama. And the boy's numerous encounters with the famous, including Billie Holiday, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Dylan Thomas, provide celebrity cameo appearances. Even these moments are presented in the author's straightforward style and journalist-as-memoirist voice: no poetic arias, just personal details presented, factual misconceptions corrected, and inside information revealed.
Less straightforward is the narrative structure. Characters and events are frequently introduced and explained, left behind, then reintroduced and explained as if for the first time. As Yogi Berra, catcher on that 1955 Yankees team, might put it: ''It's like dejà vu all over again."
Had the story been presented less redundantly and more chronologically, the dramatization of the seventh game would have seemed smoother. The game begins less than one-fourth of the way into the book, and does not end until only a few pages remain, as the author repeatedly leaves the scene to provide history and context on baseball, Brooklyn, and his family.
The alternative would have been to present the game without interruption. But little is happening in the Oliphant apartment itself, as son and father watch the television in silence, the father uttering but one word, just before the last pitch of the game.
These apparently necessary interruptions work best when the link to Oliphant and his family is not ignored for long. The breaks work least well when Oliphant the reporter shoves aside the boy and the columnist (such as in a chapter profiling the seventh game's two starting pitchers) --when the ''I" in memoir is temporarily lost.
Even with the narrative replays and rain delays, the story builds to a beautiful and moving resolution, proving that the true center of this book is not the seventh game of the World Series. The heart of the story is the love of a family for a place, a baseball team, but mostly for each other.
David Maloof is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. 
