"John Kessel - The Franchise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

his unfortunate name, was anything but bush.

That George Bush should end up playing first base for the Washington
Senators in the 1959 World Series was the result of as improbable a
sequence of events as had ever conspired to make a man of a rich boy. The
key moment had come on a May Saturday in 1948 when he had shaken
the hand of Babe Ruth.

That May morning the Yale baseball team was to play Brown, but
before the game a ceremony was held to honor Ruth, donating the
manuscript of his autobiography to the university library. George, captain
of the Yale squad, would accept the manuscript. As he stood before the
microphone set up between the pitcher's mound and second base, he was
stunned by the gulf between the pale hulk standing before him and the
legend he represented. Ruth, only fifty-three on that spring morning, could
hardly speak for the throat cancer that was killing him. He gasped out a
few words, stooped over, rail thin, no longer the giant he had been in the
twenties. George took his hand. It was dry and papery and brown as a leaf
in fall. Through his grip George felt the contact with glorious history, with
feats of heroism that would never be matched, with 714 home runs and
1,356 extra-base hits, with a lifetime slugging percentage of .690, with the
called shot and the sixty-homer season and the 1927 Yankees and the
curse of the Red Sox. An electricity surged up his arm and directly into his
soul. Ruth had accomplished as much, in his way, as a man could
accomplish in a life, more, even, George realized to his astonishment, than
had his father, Prescott Bush. He stood there stunned, charged with an
unexpected, unasked-for purpose.

He had seen death in the war, had tasted it in the blood that streamed
from his forehead when he'd struck it against the tail of the TBM Avenger
as he parachuted out of the flaming bomber over the Pacific in 1943. He
had felt death's hot breath on his back as he frantically paddled the yellow
rubber raft away from Chichi Jima against waves pushing him back into
the arms of the Japanese, had felt death draw away and offered up a silent
prayer when the conning tower of the U.S.S. Finback broke through the
agitated seas to save him from a savage fateтАФto, he always knew, some
higher purpose. He had imagined that purpose to be business or public
service. Now he recognized that he had been seeing it through his father's
eyes, that in fact his fate lay elsewhere. It lay between the chalk lines of a
playing field, on the greensward of the infield, within the smells of pine tar
and sawdust and chewing tobacco and liniment. He could feel it through
the tendons of the fleshless hand of Babe Ruth that he held in his own at
that very instant.

The day after he graduated from Yale he signed, for no bonus, with the
Cleveland Indians. Ten years later, George had little to show for his bold
choice. He wasn't the best first baseman you ever saw. Nobody ever
stopped him on the street to ask for his autograph. He never made the
Indians, got traded to the Browns. He hung on, bouncing up and down the
farm systems of seventh- and eighth-place teams. Every spring he went to