Pafko at the Wall: Review

Imagine having a drone at the Polo Grounds at game three of the 1951 National League play offs, flying from one vantage point to the next. Catching dialogues, seeing the crowd in a partly empty stadium that still is filled with electricity and hope. You might get something like ‘Pafko at the wall’, a novella that reads like a 90 page poem.
Don DeLillo, famous author and multiple Pulitzer winner, sketches scenes of that faithful day, like no one else. If you want to feel, smell, see and be in the stands on that October 3rd 1951, read this piece.

Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra and others take center stage in a cast of extras. Among showers op ripped up pieces of paper and one boy who jumped the turnstiles, defeated the ushers and stadium cops to leave the game with a piece of history.
Then a dance commences between boy and man, focussing in a nine inch circumference red stiched sphere.

The whole thing is a shakespearean play, where the underdogs had to put across the message ‘it’s over, only when the fat lady sings’. And she sung her heart out.
More than 70 years later, a Dodger fan can still feel the pain, but it was never brought so painfully beautiful as in DeLillo’s novella.

If you want more from the lead actors of this play... read ‘The Echoing Green: the untold story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the shot heard around the world’. Reviewed here.