Baseball and Ulysses

When Christian Sheppard was studying to procure a Doctor of Philosophy (best known as a Ph.D.) in religion at the University of Chicago, he was pushing his new-born daughter around Swift Hall in a stroller. A graduate student smoking a cigarette walked up and asked one question:

“How are you going to raise her?”

“I quipped, ‘I’m going to raise her a Cubs’ fan,’” recalled Sheppard.

That he did. And in many ways, that decision was the impetus for the engaging book the adjunct assistant professor at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago wrote, published last year by Greenleaf. Entitled The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball, the expert in ancient history ties lessons from the Greek warrior Odysseus to baseball.

“I wondered: If you went to Wrigley Field and pondered the big questions, what answers would you get?” said Sheppard, an energetic conversationalist, while drinking a coffee at Vanille Patisserie on Clark Street. “I found out the answers were similar to Homer’s epics – heroic virtue.”

Sheppard points out that arete, translated as virtue in the ancient world, doesn’t exactly mean what we think of today: high moral standards. The word hearkens to the god of war Ares.

“War for the Greeks was the crucible of competition, a game with lethal stakes where character was forged and virtue displayed,” Sheppard wrote. To put it another way, the word virtue derives from the Latin virtus, meaning manliness. Sheppard also associates it with excellence.

“There’s a great moment in The Odyssey when Odysseus was unrecognized by the crowd and throws a discus farther than anyone,” Sheppard noted. “People said, ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I am Odysseus.’ He reveals himself through his excellence, same as when Cubs’ outfielder Andre Dawson threw a strike from right field to home plate to get a runner.”

Despite his present love of the Cubs, Sheppard grew up in Boston and worshiped the Red Sox. Then, in 1981, they broke his heart when they traded Carlton Fisk to the White Sox.

“There’s no explanation for that at a certain age,” said Sheppard, who as a boy was also a catcher like Fisk.

When the Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino in 2004, he experienced a revelation.

“I was cheering for the Red Sox to win that World Series, but the back of my head said, ‘If it was only the Cubs,’” Sheppard noted. “I knew then I was a Cubs fan.

“One of my favorite things is that Theo Epstein gave me a blurb for my book. I sent him a copy and wrote, ‘To the man who’s given me more happiness than anyone but my wife.’”

And what was the reaction of daughter Cecilia – who is now involved with fashion in New York City – to Ancient Wisdom?

“She liked the book a lot,” Sheppard said. “She grew up beside it. We went to about 30 games a season.”

Amazingly, Sheppard took more than 20 years to complete the 174-page work.

“That’s because I let it grow naturally like a coral reef,” he explained. “My wife would say I’m a lazy procrastinator.

“I kept writing in my journal about the games we attended. My editor said one time, ‘You need to describe when someone loses their temper.’ I remembered when Cubs’ manager Lou Piniella did. I cut it from my journal and put it in the book.”

Sheppard said the debut of the movie The Odyssey this summer goosed sales. He expects a bigger bump in the future, as he believes the film will prompt more teaching of Homer in colleges.

“It’s a good book to get into getting to know the stories of Homer,” he said, “and easier because it’s not in iambic pentameter.”

What’s next? Sheppard is finishing a novel on chariot racing, prompted by the time he taught Edward Gibbon’s tome The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

“When Rome is at the darkest of the dark ages, they had a chariot race in Constantinople,” he said. “They protested and rioted against the emperor, and they massacred all these people.”

So perhaps it won’t be as light as Ancient Wisdom, which is well-written, funny and breezy. There are a few quibbles: Wrigley Field was not built by the chewing-gum magnate after whom it is now named (the builder, former Cubs Owner Charles Weeghman, was a restaurant magnate though). And the rubber in the baseball held by Andre Dawson in the 1980s did not come from the Amazon jungle (the rubber in early-20th-century baseballs did). But these can be corrected in the paperback version.

Sheppard wrote that “every baseball game, if viewed from the right angle, reenacts an ancient myth.” What does he mean by that?

“In the study of myths, one of the big turning points was when the idea these myths weren’t just stories, but they accompanied rituals,” he explained. “These stories would be told at weddings and funerals. These were the stories of what mattered most.

“Baseball tells the stories of heroes trying to come home. Ancient Wisdom is an accessible way to find out what baseball – and therefore life – might mean.”