The Old Is New Again

Thomas Dyja: Author and Editor

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By Donald G. Evans

Thomas Dyja was a recent Columbia University graduate in 1984 when the fateful ground ball squirmed under Leon Durham’s mitt, rolled into right field, and set in motion a disastrous collapse that ended with the San Diego Padres leading a World Series parade. A literary upstart from the North Side, Tom sat down to write an homage to that time.

“I was a 21-year-old English major set loose on the world,” he says. “I wrote it on an electric typewriter with no letter s.”

An odd confluence of influences inspired Tom’s approach and style to the piece: T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land his poem parodies, and Bleacher Bums, which was enjoying huge popularity about that time. The wit, intense historical detail and density of plot that would later become Tom’s trademark in the novels Play for a Kingdom (1997), Meet John Trow (2002) and The Moon in Our Hands (2004) were all there, but his reputation was not yet made.

The elegy went unpublished.

It wasn’t until nearly 25 years later that Tom placed The Wave Land on bardball.com, and the piece subsequently found a second home in Cubbie Blues. Tom became aware of bardball in part because he admired co-founder James Finn Garner’s work. “I thought, ‘What the hell, why write a new poem about the Cubs when you got one 20 years old that still works,’ ” Tom says.

Tom grew up on Menard Avenue, and went to North Side grade schools St. Williams (2600 N. Sayre), where his mom recently retired after a 40-year teaching career, and St. John Bosco (2250 N. Mcvicker), where Hugh Hefner was married. He went on to sports powerhouse Gordon Tech High School.

“Going to Wrigley Field was the first trip I ever made on my own with friends,” Tom says. “I made the long trek on the Addison bus. Sixth grade, I think. It could be a depressing place: sitting in half-empty bleachers, old people with no teeth betting with money in cups. It was much more of an adult experience. I meant to bring back a little of that, when going to a ballgame wasn’t a fully consumered experience.”

The Cubs were, as with so many boys, a big part of Tom’s childhood. Tom raced home to watch games on WGN, revered Billy Williams and Ernie Banks, and despite a brief flirtation with the White Sox during the Dick Allen era, remained a loyal fan. But he remained in New York after his graduation from Columbia, and has now been there longer than here. He raised a family in New York, including 14-year-old son Nick, who follows the Yankees and the Cubs.

“I never lost my faithfulness to the Cubs,” Tom says. “Our family goes both ways. My daughter’s nickname is ‘Cubby’.”

Tom’s mother still lives at Fullerton and Central, in a house that’s been in the family more than 80 years. He keeps in touch with Chicago that way, the same as he keeps in touch with the Cubs. He does admit, though, that New York has some advantages as a baseball city.

“The weeks after 9/11 were such an amazing period,” Tom says. “I went to Game Three of the World Series that year. It was surreal how they won those games. You’d have to be dead to not be lifted up.”

Tom also thinks that there’s no experience in Chicago to compare to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry.

“New York baseball fans, because they’ve been watching first-rate baseball for so long, have no patience for crap,” he says. “They’re really sharp about baseball. Bartman would never have happened in New York.”

Anybody who’s read Play for a Kingdom knows that Tom uses baseball as a device to explore greater societal and historical issues. The impromptu baseball games between Confederate and Union soldiers in that book worked to display the boy-like qualities in men fighting a grizzled, bloody war. It demonstrated shared sensibility among factions deeply divided. It humanized the battlefield.

“Sports is more interesting than a game; it is the original performance art,” he says. “It is ultimately not separable from art. You have people who have mastered certain skills in an enclosed space and they’re driving to create this new thing every day. And then there’s this  whole narrative built around the action—the stories of the season, the team, the players, the rivalries—that create a second layer of drama.”

The baseball games mirror the military battles in Play for a Kingdom. And while the games are fiction, Tom’s intense research turned up information, including battlefield maps, that makes the events plausible. He found a chapter in Albert Spaulding’s America’s National Game (unofficially, the first history of baseball) that reported rumors of a series of games between the North and the South. He combined that with research findings in the Brooklyn Historical Society on a multiethnic regiment that was more the prototype of a modern than Civil War military regiment.

“I’m looking at history in another way,” he says. “I use baseball as a way to a lot of other things. It’s all about people turning into humans again.”

The games in Play for a Kingdom are interesting, in part, because it is the very beginning of baseball as we know it. The English game of cricket, imported to America during Colonial times, was still the more popular sport, but after the Civil War, according to Tom, the original incarnation “almost disappeared” in the States.

“Sports is an important way in, for any country,” says Tom, who also is fascinated by European football. “What do they play? Why do they play it? What about it excites them? You can learn a lot.”

That weighty book earned Tom the prestigious Casey Award for best baseball book in 1997. As a book editor at Bantam, Tom put out a series of baseball books, including editions of Rotisserie League Baseball. Later, as a book packager, he worked on projects with Baseball Weekly, USA Today and ESPN.

The Wave Land, by contrast, is more rollicking fun. It is Tom’s only foray into poetry.

“It’s kind of a funny juxtaposition,” Tom says of modeling his poem after one of his favorite poets. “One of last people I’d ever imagine seeing at a baseball game would be T.S. Eliot. Hemingway at the ballpark wouldn’t be funny. T.S. Eliot: funny. I wanted Gene Clines and Jose Cardenal in there. There are certain things that need to be remembered; if I can get a few people to remember Jose Cardenal and his stuck eyelids, then I’ve done my job.”

Those memories are rooted in Tom’s childhood, a time when he played baseball at Riis Park and delivered the neighborhood newspaper The Leader, when he toiled away among thousands of Catholic school boys and a few hard-fisted priests. His interest in the Yankees comes from an adult place, a place in which he realized many of his literary goals, where he coaxed a son to adolescence, and where he now calls home.

His dream is to see the two teams meet in the ultimate series.

“When I wrote [The Wave Land] it was a time similar to last season,” Tom says. “Everybody thought it was going to be a breakthrough year. In 2003, we had the possibility of a Yankees-Cubs World Series. I would have paid any amount of money to see that.”

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