A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the splendor of Pacific Bell Park with three friends, playing hit ball and watching the Giants beat the Padres during a balmy evening on San Francisco Bay. At the same time, Game 1 of the NBA Finals was occurring, and several people around us held radios to their ear, giving updates to the crowd – “Sixers are up! It’s in overtime!” Days earlier, the greatest wide receiver of all time had just crossed the Bay to sign with the loathsome Raiders, and this warranted a bit of conversation between us as well. (And if you feel the need to challenge whether Jerry Rice is in fact not only the greatest wideout ever, but perhaps the greatest football player ever, I can be reached at: tenaciousgreebs@yahoo.com.)

Suddenly, one of my friends asked, “What would life be like without sports?” It wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question -- it was an actual inquiry. “Seriously, what would it be like?” None of us had an answer, and none of us wanted one – the idea was both inconceivable and disturbing. While I have several good friends who care not a whit about sports, this makes no sense to me. Sports bring about something that I can’t find anywhere else, a communal passion and appreciation of acts heroic and tragic that is simply absent in so many other parts of my life. I love reading as much as I love watching baseball, but the book group I’ve been a part of – while quite fun – never held a candle to a day at the yard.

Being a sports fan gives one equal footing to bond with strangers, to find a kinship with someone who might otherwise be one’s opposite. At more than a few occasions in my life, I have found myself in stadiums, bars or elsewhere, high-fiving or even hugging a complete stranger, because we had just both witnessed something incredible, something amazing. I remember in the fall of 1998, being in Mexico for a friends wedding, and huddling around a TV watching highlights from SportsCenter, watching Mark McGwire break Roger Maris’ seemingly untouchable record. The memory of Big Mac lifting up his son in joy as he crossed home plate still gives me goosebumps. I remember watching the Olympics where a hobbled track star was helped across the finish line by his father, who came out of the stands, and I think to myself that there isn’t anything in “real life” that moves me like this on a daily basis. Sports mean something special to folks like me, and I have absolutely no shame in that; in fact, I relish in it. In this, Scott Simon is a kindred spirit.

Scott Simon’s Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan is a sweeping account of Simon’s life, particularly – though not exclusively – as it pertains to his life as a sports fan, specifically as a Chicago sports fan. For those of you – like myself – who don’t listen to much National Public Radio, Simon’s name might not be familiar. He is a host of a weekly radio show that has quite a fan base, and if this book is any indication, I might start tuning in on Saturday mornings when it airs in the near future. While Simon’s book isn’t perfect, it is consistently entertaining and well written, and should be enjoyable for all fans of either sport or Simon.

Simon spent most of his formative years in Chicago; though he does provide a wonderful account of living in San Francisco in the mid 1950’s, and listening to people reminisce about local legend Joe DiMaggio. Still, his bias – if one can really call it that – is towards Chicago teams. The Cubs, Bears and Bulls are the specific teams that Simon roots for, and describes the various exploits of with vivid detail.

In the second chapter, called “I’m a Fan,” Simon credibly explains why he is not a fan of hockey, soccer, boxing or other pursuits that others may find absent from this text, and in most cases I agree spot on with his analysis. I mention this section because it contains perhaps the single most bizarre and disturbing part of the book. In a footnote, Simon writes “…Bebe Neuwirth may be a more complex athlete than [Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemiux or Michael Jordan.] She displays all the moves of Jordan, Gretzky, and Lemieux – all while singing and dancing. Not even the most extravagant fan of Space Jam would make such a claim for Michael Jordan. Fair enough, but…Bebe Neuwirth as a more complex athlete than these absolute legends? I don’t care how talented she is, or how politically correct it is to write something like this, it’s simply apples and oranges. It’s absurd enough that I did a little research to see whether Simon and Neuwirth were married. It is to the rest of Simon’s credit, and my patience, that I read on (it was, in truth, only on page 17.)

And, quite frankly, I’m very glad that I did. In many cases, Simon details so well what it means to be a fan. In detailing his experience on the night that Cal Ripken Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played, Simon captures what it means to be a fan almost perfectly:

We were fans. By the time I landed at Washington’s National Airport, other fans had laid down their laptops and sample books, or stood with an elbow on their rolling trash carts or floor brushes to look up at Cal Jr. on the airport television screens. A grown man with a receding gray crown of hair, jumping up from the ball field like a boy to slap hands with fans and hug his friends, his family, and the men on the opposite team. “Goddamn,” said a score of people, shaking their heads. “Goddamn, that’s something. Isn’t that something?” Not a small number of eyes, including my own, were glistening. You can tell yourself: it’s just sports, nothing real; it has nothing to do with your life, no resonance in the real world of living, dying and struggling. And you’d be right. Then, something happens. MJ leaps! Mac swings! Flutie scores! And inside, where your body cannot kid you, something takes over and it feels real. It’s not like tearing up at your wedding, sobbing at a funeral, or choking up at a child’s first steps. It’s closer to seeing Caesar stabbed, or watching Emily Webb in Our Town so wistfully, tearfully, exclaim in Act II, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anyone to realize you!”

It’s a hell of a description, although I included the Our Town quote both to complete Simon’s sentence and also to break you into his fascination with this quote. He uses it three times in the book, and seeing as I haven’t read or seen the play since 1980, it didn’t resonate very well for me. Maybe I need to brush up on my Thornton Wilder.

In any case, Simon recounts his years of being a Cub fan, a Bear fan, and most thoroughly, a Bulls fan, all with the backdrop of his actual life – his relationship with his father, his step-father, his travails as a war correspondent and as a political reporter stateside. In many cases, these details give the book it’s heart, especially for those of us who don’t care much about the 1969 Cubs season. However, there are times when Simon spends too much time away from the sports – this is, after all, a memoir of a fan. Sections that detailed the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Sarajevo in particular were interesting, but detracted from what I was there for. Jesse Jackson does enough self-promotion, I don’t need to read about it in a book about a sports fan. Call it an intelligent but similarly distracting halftime show, without Britney Spears’ midriff.

While Simon is about fifteen years older than I am, I was happy to find that he details enough sports memories from the eighties and on that I could remember and relate to them. Simon in his current job has access to places that others don’t, and his travails therefore have an insiders edge that, for instance, my memoirs clearly would not. His access actually started as a child, as his father did radio for the Cleveland Indians, a job “… that deprives me of any right to complain about the tiniest blights on a fortunate childhood.” His “uncle” was Jack Brickhouse, the announcer for the Cubs. In this way, I did have a bit of detachment from Simon in that I couldn’t relate to his memories in the way I had hoped. It’s a double-edged sword of course – his memories and anecdotes would be significantly more mundane without his connections and jobs, but those exact connections put a bit of a bridge between me and the author, albeit a small bridge.

Simon is clearly a fan, and an unashamed one at that. It does color his perception as it should for any good fan, and while Simon admits this in most cases, other things look questionable under less jaded eyes. (For instance, he writes that Phil Jackson gets accused of merely not getting in the way of Jordan, but “Does anyone deprecate Pat Riley’s coaching by saying that Donald Duck could coach a team with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to a championship?” Well, actually, yes. Riley has had exactly that criticism leveled against him, denigration that is just as preposterous as suggesting that Jackson merely got out of the way of Jordan, Pippen and crew.)

In all, this is a very enjoyable book, and in many ways enjoyable for things that have nothing to do with sports. Simon’s details about his relationship with his stepfather are truly wonderful, as are his details of his early experiences with his father. He structures sentences quite well, making his very personal recollections quite often seemed shared, and even when he is recalling a moment at a Chicago Bulls’ holiday party, it seems human because Simon is talking about how he is slipping through the crowd hoping to overhear what Scottie Pippen is talking about. There is no pretense in these memoirs, only the shared experience of a true fan. While it’s not a perfect tome, it’s excellent reading for anyone who considers him or herself a sports fan.

And, for the rest of you…you don’t know what you’re missing.


Note – this review is part of a writeoff between myself and fellow sports fans mshawpyle and CurtisEdmonds. For their reviews of this book, either click at the link at the bottom of this review, or on their profile pages, where you’ll also find links to scads of their other excellent work.



Recommended: Yes