Judicial Restraint and Judicial Activism: The Myth of the Great American Comeback: The Natural and Shoeless Joe
'The Comeback Kid.' How many times have we heard this phrase, in modern politics and also in the world of sports? It is said that Americans love winners, but even more than winners, Americans adore people who have suffered adversity, lost, and then win again. This is exemplified in the narratives of The Natural by Bernard Malamud and Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. However, while Malamud's novel is a complicated celebration of American individualism and cut-throat competition, as exemplified in the American mythology surrounding baseball, Kinsella takes the same themes of excellence and corruption in sports and uses them to celebrate the teamwork of baseball. At the beginning of The Natural, Roy Hobbs, the washed-up protagonist of Malamud's novel, is a squeaky-clean white bread boy from the Midwest who became involved in a scandal involving a woman after he was recruited by the major leagues. He is shot by a woman in a hotel room, and then, driven away by the bad press, lays low until he is in his mid-30s, when he returns to capture his lost greatness as a batter. He does so, in the embodiment of another American myth, because he is a natural talent. He needs little help from other people. He is a self-made man, the creme de la
' Whenever his obsessive, competitive drive for baseball becomes diluted, so does his success in his game, and ultimately his reputation as a ballplayer is destroyed. And even when some team spirit shines through, when people show outrage at his low salary, "it's a crying shame that a man as good as Roy should get a rock-bottom salary" given his contribution to bolstering the name of the Knights, Hobbs does not seem to feel any more friendly to his teammates (Malamud 89). But the fact that Hobbs is never "for the team' but is only determined to win "the world for himself" also shows the selfishness of his character and the selfishness of the American mythology surrounding baseball (Malamud 85). Baseball's focus on the individual moment of the hitter's or the pitcher's glory embodies American individualism in its purest form, even though the scoring of the sport contains the superficial, surface trappings of good sportsmanship and fair play. Only when Roy cannot have her does he seem to develop a determination to win her, like he wants to win at baseball. "This must be heaven," Shoeless Joe says, upon seeing the ball field, as if baseball, and the chance to make good on one's talent is a kind of paradise (Kinsella 19). Utterly masculine, Roy Hobbs is coldly competitive, both in the bedroom and on the field. It is not sex that diverts him from baseball, but caring too much about a woman. Hobbs is so powerful that one crack from his bat named 'Wonderboy' at practice can make a dead field grow green. After Hobbs gives up a game for a woman, he is finished; he is no longer the mythical, individualistic entity that he once was. It is Memo who proves this 'natural' player's undoing. Hobbs refuses to listen to locker-room pep talks, and rather than drinking the spiritual Kool-Aid provided by the pop psychologist and hypnotist Doc Knobb who is brought in to bolster the morale of the New York Knights, Hobbs simply looks within himself for strength (Malamud 66). Playing baseball requires a team; this is why Shoeless Joe urges Ray to finish the field, after Ray only builds the section of the field devoted to Shoeless Joe's position. Unlike Hobbs of The Natural, Ray remains true to himself, however irrational his impulses. Kinsella, there is still the hope of a comeback for the turn-of the century ballplayer who was involved in the scandal of throwing the World Series and the author believes that there is some redemptive power in the game.
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Acceptance Essays
