SEE YOU AT THE HEAVENLY WORLD SERIES:

It must have been in the mid 1980s when I took Michael to old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore for an Orioles game on a glorious spring evening. There was one feature of that old brick-and-concrete horseshow that never failed to move me: As you came up one of the cement ramps to the upper deck, you caught a glimpse of the infield and a part of the outfield beneath the overhanging mezzanine section of the ballpark. That first sight of the greensward each season was always redolent of renewal, and as Michael and I shared that sense of vernal reawakening, the sharp crack of a batting-practice ball leaving an ash bat and heading for the bleachers rang through the stadium. "Greatest sound in sports," I said. "Except for 'swish,'" Michael immediately replied, thus revealing himself as a hoops man at heart. 

I've watched countless hours of games with a vast number of people over the past six decades, on site or on television: but I have never met anyone, anywhere, who got such intense pleasure out of sports as Michael Novak did. And not "intense" in the Bill Belichick sense of the clenched-jaw scowl, but "intense" as in sheer pleasure. Michael being Michael, that passion for our games overflowed into his writing, including the book he wanted to call "Balls" until an antsy editor talked him into something a little more, er, delicate: The Joy of Sports. But whatever the title, it was a book replete with insights that could come from only a passionate fan who had played the games and then thought seriously about them: baseball's freedom from clock time as a signal of transcendence and its unique combination of individual achievement and team play as the embodiment of the "communitarian individual"; football as "the liturgy of the bureaucratic state." The thought of never having the opportunity to watch another game with him, swapping stories and second-guessing managers and coaches, is not a happy one. But if heaven is the perfection of earthly goods, we'll pick up the conversation in a place without instant replay, because the umps and refs always get it right.

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