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Frank's Place: A poet from the press box

I encountered Sid Szymanski, a fictional softball catcher, earlier this year while browsing through a poetry anthology in a Midwestern bookstore.

Sarah Freligh's latest book of poetry is "Sad Math." The former Inquirer sportswriter frequently writes about sports in her prose.
Sarah Freligh's latest book of poetry is "Sad Math." The former Inquirer sportswriter frequently writes about sports in her prose.Read more

I encountered Sid Szymanski, a fictional softball catcher, earlier this year while browsing through a poetry anthology in a Midwestern bookstore.

In the "City of Tonawanda Softball Championship," Szymanski is old and alone, the substance of his life as insubstantial as his broken body. But while wheelchair-bound in a crowded New York nursing home, he still can draw solace from a memory, the long-ago night he scored the winning run in a bar-league championship. At poem's end, he is:

"Mumbling and lost, wrapped

"in the soft cloth of memory:

"The arc of the white ball, a pearl

"in the jewel box of twilight sky."

What aging sports fan can't appreciate such an end-of-life, "Glory Days" reflection? Sports, the poet recognized, are comforting distractions to life's crueler realities.

I knew Sid. And, when I checked the index for the poet's name, I discovered I knew his creator, too.

Sportswriters talk often about the poetry of athletics. As far back as 500 B.C., Greek odes were being dedicated to the grace and power of Olympians.

Though the best writers occasionally convey that connection between poetry and sports, most of us remain focused more on the latter. Sarah Freligh is one of the few dedicated to mining poetry from sports.

Sarajane then, Freligh was once a talented and sometimes too-sensitive-for-her-own-good colleague at The Inquirer.

When she was covering Penn State football, Joe Paterno barred women from the locker room. Freligh refused to accept the edict and prodded the paper into suing.

Penn State responded with a compromise, a policy still in effect and which ought to be dubbed the Freligh Rule: Its locker room is closed, but players are brought to a central postgame interviewing area.

Freligh poured her emotions into every story, every word. Not surprisingly for a future poet, it sometimes overflowed.

One Saturday night, she phoned from the Palestra. Distraught, she'd developed writer's block. She couldn't find the words for her story.

Not long afterward, she left the business.

Since then, she's gotten a master's degree; taught creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y.; written two acclaimed books of poetry, one of which, Sad Math, won the 2015 Moon City Poetry Prize; had her work featured twice on Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" audio show; and won a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship.

Sportswriters - especially in these uncertain times for the industry - have always dreamed of writing novels or screenplays or poetry. Few have been brave enough to make the frightening leap.

Freligh was one who did, though it wasn't easy for her, either.

"The transition from newspaper person to poet was long and hardly linear," Freligh said last week. "The Inquirer's sports editor was doing a department overhaul in 1987, and I was to be moved from writer to night editor. I made an impetuous decision to quit, which led to a rough couple of years financially and otherwise. I mean, who was I without a byline? In retrospect, I made the right decision."

A Michigan native, she stayed in Philadelphia, took writing courses at Temple, and planned a novel. In 1991, she departed for Rochester.

"I figured if I was going to be a poor writer, I should be a poor writer in an affordable place," she said.

There, Freligh took a job with a poetry publisher. Her novel stalled when her mother became terminally ill. It was then, already immersed in it during the work day, that she turned to poetry.

"I was reading all these wonderful poets like Kim Addonizio, Lucille Clifton, and Dorianne Laux," she said. "They were writing about the simplest things - feeding the cat on the back porch, for example - and managing to make the experience both inclusive and moving. So I started writing poetry, and the early poems in Sort of Gone are what came out."

Not only a longtime sportswriter but at one time, at a newspaper in her home state, the nation's youngest sports editor, Freligh's work is informed by her background.

Many of the poems in Sort of Gone chronicle the highs and mostly lows of a former pitcher named Al Stepansky.

"While the character is largely fictional, some of his experiences are real," she said. " 'Minor League' is based on a real incident that I heard about secondhand. Some minor-league players who lived in the apartment building next to mine had a wild party one night during which a player punched a hole in the living room wall. He was far too drunk to risk a trip to the emergency room, so he 'cast his hand in masking tape,' just like the poem says."

In another of the baseball poems, "Relief," Freligh compares a reliever's long walk to the mound to the approach of death. In this one, a former pitcher is visiting his dying mother, perhaps for the final time:

"Seeing her, you realize there's nothing

"left, nothing to do but wait for Death

"to emerge from the bullpen, begin his slow

"showy walk from the outfield to the mound

"black satin jacket shrouding his shoulders.

"The end, at last, relief."

It's impossible to read her and not see the influence of her Philadelphia years. The area's fatalism, its fans' cynicism, its quirkiness, and the shadows and light of its urban landscape, all find their way into Freligh's work.

She will be returning here on Nov. 21 for a reading at Mount Airy's Big Blue Marble Bookstore.

"Philadelphia lives large in my heart," she said. "I love to visit, and when I do, I walk for miles and miles. It's such a great place."

In "What I've Lost," Freligh writes of one of those walks and an indulgent splurge after a rainstorm:

"I tied a garbage bag

"turban style, swanned past

"the row of four-star restaurants

"on Walnut Street, imagining I

"was a forties movie queen shooting

"a scene on a wet set. Next payday, I dropped

"seventy bucks on a steak and a bottle

"of rose, something French

"and unpronounceable, curly

"on the tongue. The sun

"was out. I forgot

"about rain and sweet

"whiskey thick

"in my throat."

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz