Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
All of us like to believe, and most of us do believe, that there’s a perilous drama to our lives even if we can’t begin to see it. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer touched on the matter in a piece the Tribune carried on Rick Ankiel, whom he compared to The Natural‘s Roy Hobbs. Krauthammer wrote: “Ronald Reagan, I was once told, said he liked ‘The Natural’ except that he didn’t understand why the Dark Lady shoots Roy Hobbs. Reagan, the preternatural optimist, may have had difficulty fathoming tragedy, but no one knows why Hobbs was shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back.”
Ankiel was a rookie pitching phenom who lost his control in the 2000 major league playoffs, staggered around in the minors for years, and finally returned to the Saint Louis Cardinals a couple weeks ago as an outfielder, promptly hitting a home run and going on to star at the plate and in the field. Hobbs was a pitching phenom until the Dark Lady shot him, but he eventually returned to baseball as a thunderous hitter who hits a home run that literally makes the stadium lights explode. Krauthammer calls the story of Hobbs a “fable.” He mentions in passing, so quickly you’ll probably miss it, that the “fable” he’s talking about is actually a movie, The Natural (1984), starring Robert Redford. He doesn’t mention at all that movie was inspired by Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, though at the end of the novel Roy Hobbs strikes out.
