| The InSide Story: A Conversation with Mike Lupica |
by Kristen Switzer
Mike Lupica returns to America's favorite pastime of baseball and scores with The Big Field, a feel-good story that shows how love of the game is a common language fathers and sons speak.
Writing about sports is obviously in your blood. Did you grow up playing sports? Which sports figures did you look up to as a child? Have you met most of them?
I grew up playing all sports, baseball being my first love. I was a second baseman. And I still think I hold the New Hampshire state high school record for breaking your glasses in a single season (14 times). I grew up in upstate New York, at least until the age of 12, so my first heroes were old New York Giants football players like Charlie Conerly and Frank Gifford and Del Shofner. We moved to New Hampshire when I was 12, and three years later I thought Carl Yastrzemski had the greatest single season from a ballplayer I ever saw. Much later in my life, when I was first spending time in Bridgehampton, on Eastern Long Island (where Yastrzemski grew up), I had one of the most enjoyable afternoons of my life just talking baseball with him about a mile from where he played his high school ball.
Have there been sports that you just didn't like or knew little about--and still had to cover for your columns or broadcasts? What sports are you now a fan of that you weren't before?
One year I had to cover the last day of the America's Cup, off Rhode Island. I showed up thinking it would last about as long as a baseball game, and then spent nine hours in the press boat, sick as a dog, watching two sails in the distance that looked to be the size of matchsticks. And the United States lost to Australia! I didn't know a lot about soccer as a child because there were no soccer teams at my schools. But having coached my sons and daughter in it, I'm a fan now. I'm writing a soccer book right now.
The Big Field features Hutch, the team captain of a summer league baseball team trying to win the Florida State Championship. He also has some major issues with his dad. What would you like us to know about Hutch?
Hutch is pure, about baseball, about the relationship he wants to have with his dad, about the relationship he has with his teammates--even Darryl at the end, who helps him see how much he has. And if there is one thing that Hutch has that all my heroes have it is this: heart. If you knock him down, he gets back up. If he makes a mistake, he learns from it. And no one is more loyal than he is. You would want him as a friend and a teammate.
Would you say that the game of baseball is itself a character in the book?
It isn't just baseball, and the beauty of baseball, that is a major character in this book. It is the language of baseball, sometimes unspoken. When Hutch and his dad think they don't have anything, when Hutch thinks that his dad doesn't care about his baseball career, it is baseball holding them together. One of my favorite scenes I've ever written comes late in the book, when Hutch watches his dad in a batting cage without his dad knowing he's there.
When you first got the idea for The Big Field, were you wanting to tell a father and son story, or were you wanting to tell a baseball story with a father and son subplot? Or did the family/baseball plot all come at once?
I've had a wonderful relationship with my dad my whole life, whether that relationship involved sports or not. In addition to everything else, he's been my best friend. I wanted to explore the other side of that in this book. This is a book about fathers and sons as much as it is about baseball. My only thought was that Hutch and his dad could get to the place I've always been in with my own dad.
Most avid sports fans would say that you have a sweet life: sports analyst and writer. What moment in sports do you wish you could have witnessed in person?
I've been very lucky. I was at Lake Placid when the US beat the Soviet Union in hockey at the 1980 Winter Games. I saw Kirk Gibson's home run, and the ball roll between Bill Buckner's legs, and I saw the Red Sox come back from 0-3 down against the Yankees, and I just saw the New York Giants win the Super Bowl in one of the very best sports moments I've ever witnessed. There is really only one thing I wished I'd seen with my own eyes: I wish I could have watched Jackie Robinson play baseball, just one time.
What sport will be featured in your next YA novel? What are you working on now? Do you plan to write any adult fiction in the future?
Right now I don't have any plans to return to adult fiction because writing the books I'm writing reminds me of a line my friend--and one of my writing heroes--Pete Hamill used one time: It's more fun than fun. I'm writing my soccer novel right now for the Comeback Kids series, and after The Big Field come two new Comeback Kids novels this year, Safe at Home and Long Shot.
What is your favorite library moment?
There is no one favorite library moment. If you ask me to think back on my childhood, I can remember going to the Public Library in Oneida, New York, and being perfectly happy to sit in the stacks all afternoon with a good book if there wasn't a game going on. I've always loved libraries.
|
|
|
