Kritik und Lob » photograph as a free-floating art obj

NOBODY THOUGHT IT would be his last, least of all him. On July 18, Alex Rodriguez hit a second-inning solo shot off Baltimore Orioles pitcher Kevin Gausman deep into the left-field seats at Yankee Stadium. It was only A-Rods ninth homer of the year, but it was also the 696th of his career, and it gave the New York Yankees a 1-0 lead en route to a 2-1 victory. After the game, he told reporters, Im getting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.Turns out it was a train. Last week, the Yankees pressured him into retiring after Fridays game, when he still could hit another. Or he could decide to come back at a later date. But for now, he remains tantalizingly close to joining Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth as the only members of the 700 Club.For some of the games greatest hitters, farewells dont always end well. Parting is such sweet sorrow and all that, but theres little poetry in balls, or players, reaching the warning track.Thats something to keep in mind as 40-year-old David Ortiz tries to finish what he says will be his last season with a bang?(528 HRs and counting); as Prince Fielder is forced to call it quits with 319 homers (same as his father, Cecil); as Mark Teixeira (404 ... do I hear 405?) takes a final bow. And as A-Rod, who just turned 41, hangs em up. In announcing his retirement, A-Rod said, As far as 700 or those types of milestones, look, I would have had an unbelievable fun time trying to go after them. ... [But] those are not the cards I was dealt.If Friday is indeed his last game, and No. 696 was his last homer, its worth replaying his trot around the bases.?As he circled the bases against the Orioles, Rodriguez blew a chewing gum bubble.As it always does, the bubble burst.SOME DAY, A-ROD will go to Cooperstown. Six days after his home run, the honors belonged to Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza. This year, as usual, the hamlet was crawling on induction weekend with gods, some in a higher pantheon than others, but all adored by their worshippers. Its as good a time and place as any to dust off the memories.George Brett, No. 317. The man in a golf shirt, shorts and Kansas City Royals ankle socks is about to tee off on the sixth hole of the Leatherstocking Golf Course in Cooperstown, New York. Its the annual golf tournament that precedes the ceremonies, and while Brett waits his turn, he is asked to go back to Sept. 26, 1993 -- the day he hit his 317th, and last, home run.Refresh my memory, he says. No, wait, its coming back to me. ... It was a 10th-inning, two-out game winner against the Angels in Kansas City. High fastball into the balcony in right.Brett then hits his tee shot straight down the middle, and, as he drives off down the fairway, he shouts, Hey, that was my second homer of the game.After his round, he asks, Who did I hit it off of? Paul Swingle.Greg Swindell? It couldnt have been him. This guy was a right-hander. Yes, he was, but his name was Paul Swingle. S-w-i-n-g-l-e.Oh. I dont remember him. And who gave up my first homer in that game? John Farrell. The Red Sox manager? Really? Thats kind of neat.Neater still was that the home runs came on the day after Brett had tearfully announced his retirement. When that Sunday game ended with his walk-off, his line in the box score read: Brett 5-3-3-5.As he says, I got to be George Brett for one more day.Mike Schmidt, No. 548. Fate is funny. With the fifth pick of the second round of the 1971 draft, the Royals selected a shortstop named George Brett. Right after that, with the sixth pick, the Philadelphia Phillies also went for a shortstop: Mike Schmidt. They would become the greatest third basemen of their generation, making 25 All-Star Games between them.They went head-to-head in the 1980 World Series, won by the Phillies, and Schmidt would win three MVPs, two more than Brett. But when it came to their final home runs, Brett got the better deal.Schmidts was a two-run homer off Jim Deshaies in the first inning of a May 2, 1989 game at the Vet -- it gave the Phillies a 2-1 lead in a game they would lose 12-4. It was a high fastball that I hit down the left-field line, Schmidt says. It barely stayed inside the foul pole. I had no idea at the time that it would be my last.Nearly a month later, Schmidt broke down at his retirement news conference.Looking back, the only reason to have delayed my retirement would have been the career numbers: I was two short of 550 home runs and five short of 1,600 RBIs -- one good game. But I was feeling my age, the team was in transition, and I had what I thought were Hall of Fame credentials and enough money. Im actually very comfortable with how my career ended and how my retirement played out. I even have the home run ball in a case at home.I just wish Id have written a better goodbye speech.Frank Thomas, No. 286. There were two Frank Thomases in Cooperstown. There was one who was in the Hall of Fame, and then there was the large hulking man signing photos and balls at a card table on Main Street.The other Frank Thomas is an 87-year-old Pittsburgh native who played for seven National League teams over 16 seasons. When fans tell him how good it is to see him alive, he tells them, Well, its a lot better to be seen than to be viewed.Thomas was a pretty good slugger in his day, not to mention the Home Run King of New York in 1962 (he hit 34 for the original Mets, while Roger Maris hit 33 and Mickey Mantle 30 for the Yankees). Asked about his final homer, Frank has to think. I dont remember much about it. Wait, I was with the Astros, and it was against the Mets. And it got me traded!It was Aug. 31, 1965, at Shea Stadium, and, like Brett, Thomas hit his last two home runs in the same game. In fact, the right-handed-hitting first baseman provided all of the Astros offense in a 4-3 victory, with a three-run bomb off Larry Miller in the first inning with Joe Morgan and Jimmy Wynn aboard and a solo shot in the third off Darrell Sutherland.The next day, they sent me to my old pals on the [Atlanta] Braves for a player to be named later, Thomas says. I guess they figured I had something left. No more homers, but I got to play the last month of the season with Hank [Aaron] and Eddie [Mathews] again. Joe Torre and Phil Niekro, too. Thats four Hall of Famers right there. That was my reward, I guess.Frank Thomas, No. 521. The Big Hurt was also in town, looking as imposing as ever beside his plaque, which has him in his White Sox hat. But it didnt end well for him in Chicago: He was hurt big when the club released him after winning the 2005 World Series. He signed with the Oakland As and hit another 39 in 06, then 26 more as the Toronto Blue Jays DH in 07. Then the fly balls started coming up short. On Aug. 9, 2008, back on the As and playing at Comerica Park, Thomas hit one last home run, a two-out, first-inning shot to left-center off Armando Galarraga.He played 18 more games that season, then went into denial, refusing to announce his retirement. Finally, on Feb. 12, 2010, Thomas officially called it quits by signing a one-day contract with the White Sox, who announced that they would be retiring his No. 35. At the news conference, he said, For some reason, it seems like there is never a happy ending to superstars careers. They end up playing for other teams -- but they always end up coming back.Had he hit one more home run, Thomas would be alone at No. 20 on the all-time list. But hes in very good company with 521, tied with Willie McCovey and ...Ted Williams, No. 521. Standing sentinel on the first floor of Cooperstowns museum is The Splendid Splinter. His statue perfectly captures his lefty-swinging follow-through -- the same follow-through he used to hit his 521st homer off Jack Fisher in the eighth inning of a 5-4 comeback win over the Orioles.It was not only the last at-bat of his career but also the inspiration for one of the finest sports stories ever written. Here is how John Updike described the third pitch of the at-bat in Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu, which appeared in the Oct. 22, 1960, issue of The New Yorker:Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs -- hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didnt tip his cap. ... The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.Al Kaline, No. 399. As Williams was to Boston, Kaline was to Detroit. Mr. Tigers final round-tripper was a ninth-inning, two-run homer off Reggie Cleveland in Fenway on Sept. 18, 1974, but it didnt mean much to the Tigers, who lost 8-5, or to Kaline at the time.I hardly recall it, says Kaline, who was at a cocktail reception in the Hall of Fame gallery, not far from the Williams figure. I do remember my home run off Steve Carlton in the 1968 World Series and my 11th-inning homer off Rollie Fingers in the 72 ALCS. But I never really tried to hit home runs. I was more concerned with getting to 3,000 hits. That was the mark I was really after. ... It wasnt until Yaz came along that I really realized the significance of 400 home runs.Kaline did get his 3,000th hit, in his hometown Baltimore, and five years later, Carl Yastrzemski recorded both. Indeed, its right there on his plaque: FIRST AMERICAN LEAGUER TO HAVE 400 HOME RUNS AND 3,000 HITS.Roberto Clemente, No. 240. He hit it on Sept. 13, 1972, and it was his 10th homer of the season. Seventeen days later, he got the 3,000th hit of his career. Who could have known they would be the last of each -- Clemente died in a plane crash on New Years Eve, en route to delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua.What a shock, says Ferguson Jenkins, the Hall of Famer who gave up the Hall of Famers final home run. I loved facing Roberto, and believe me, we faced each other a lot over the years.It was the sixth time Clemente had homered off Jenkins. The only other pitcher to give up as many as six to Clemente was Sandy Koufax. I remember it like it was yesterday, Jenkins says. Wrigley Field, seventh inning, right? Man on and two outs, score tied 3-3. He was a bad-ball hitter, so I tried to throw it off the plate, get him to chase. I forget the count, but I threw it inside, and he hit it over the ivy in left. You win some, you lose some, and that one I lost.Because this was the 25th anniversary of Fergies induction, he invited his family up to Cooperstown. He showed them the Clemente statue in the museum.Steve Garvey, No. 272. When he retired in 1988, there was no way Garvey wasnt going into the Hall of Fame -- not with his 10 All-Star appearances, his .338 batting average in 11 postseason series, the National League record for most consecutive games played (1,207).But his numbers were diminished by the sluggers of the steroid era, and his once angelic reputation was tarnished by a soap operatic personal life. Now Garvey is stuck in purgatory, and, on this HOF weekend, he is sitting at the same table in the same souvenir shop with the devil himself, Pete Rose.Garveys last home run came on April 12, 1987, a three-run, first-inning homer off the Cincinnati Reds Guy Hoffman at Riverfront Stadium that gave the San Diego Padres a 3-0 lead en route to a 5-2 victory. One Hall of Famer, Tony Gwynn, scored ahead of Garvey, and another, Barry Larkin, watched it sail out of the park.It went into the seats in left-center, Garvey says. I didnt think it would be my last, but then, you never do.?Bicep tendinitis got to me, and I [missed the rest of the 1987 season]. I didnt know what became of the ball.But then a funny thing happened. Six or seven years ago, a box arrives in the mail. Its from one of the groundskeepers at Riverfront. Back in those days, you could buy game balls and stuff in the team store, and he bought the home run ball. I guess he saw the date and realized the significance. Eventually, he tracked me down and sent it to me because he thought I might like to have it.Its kind of special. Not so much because of its significance but more because a fan went out of his way to send me a gift he thought I might want.George Foster, No. 348. Right across the street from Garvey, in another souvenir store, is another man who thought he might be going to Cooperstown for a different reason. I really thought I would get 500, which would have gotten me into the Hall of Fame, Foster says. Just five more 30-homer seasons. But injuries got the best of me.When Foster hit 52 home runs for the 1977 Reds, only seven other players had hit more in a season. But after the Mets acquired him in 82, he went from great to good to gone: He and manager Davey Johnson locked horns, and he was released in August of 86. The White Sox picked him up, and it was for them that he hit No. 348, a solo shot in the fourth inning off Bill Wegman on Aug. 15. Two months later, his ex-teammates on the Mets won the World Series.Though his MLB career was soon over, Foster still had a little left in him: He reappeared in 1989 in the Senior Professional Baseball Association, where he hit 11 homers in 70 games for the St. Lucie Legends.Eddie Murray, No. 504. A final home run ball is worth saving. But sometimes circumstances prevent that. Murray was playing for the Angels on May 30, 1997, when he hit a solo shot in the second inning of a game the Minnesota Twins would win 4-3. It was off Bob Tewksbury to center field, he says. Thats about all I remember. I dont even know what happened to the ball.The funny thing is that, the year before, when I hit 22 for the Cleveland Indians and Baltimore Orioles, the balls kept bouncing back on the field, and people were collecting them for me. I think I have 19 of those. But that last one happened so early in the season that I had no idea it would be my last.Actually, that was not the last professional home run that Murray hit. Yeah, I hit two more that season for Albuquerque after the Dodgers picked me up. That was weird, me playing with all those kids. I have no idea who gave up my last one.Just for the record, it was a Phoenix pitcher named Mike Villano.Donora, Pennsylvania, No. 1,259. Seven hours west-southwest of Cooperstown is another baseball mecca, a town of 5,000 that, thanks to native sons Stan Musial, Ken Griffey Sr. and Ken Griffey Jr., can claim more home runs per capita than any other place on earth. Together they hit 1,257 -- the other two came from Steve Filipowicz, a Donoran who had them for the 1945 New York Giants.The last one was hit by one of the men celebrated in this Cooperstown weekend, Ken Griffey Jr. It came on Oct. 3, 2009, in the bottom of the fourth inning of a game between the Rangers and Mariners at Safeco Field. Junior took Tommy Hunters 3-1 pitch deep to right field to give the Ms a 1-0 lead in a game they would win 2-1. At the time, it was his 19th homer of the season, the 630th of his career.Nineteen years and 595 home runs earlier, there was another date to remember: Sept. 14, 1990. Thats when the Griffeys homered back-to-back off the Angels Kirk McCaskill to become the first father-son combo to go yard in the same game. After touching home plate, Senior told Junior, Thats how you do it, son.Willard Brown, No. 1. Hes in the Hall of Fame for his hitting, baserunning and outfield play for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. But he did play for the St. Louis Browns in 1947, and became the first African-American to hit a home run in the American League: an inside-the-park homer off future Hall of Famer Hal Newhouser of the Tigers on Aug. 13. It was also his last in the majors, and the last for the bat he used.It seems he had borrowed it from teammate Jeff Heath, who was so enraged at his presumption that he smashed the lumber to pieces in the dugout.Hank Aaron, No. 755, and Billy Williams, No. 426. Whats it like to give up a Hall of Famers last home run? Dick Drago knows. Pitching for the Angels, he gave up two in a two-week span.Aarons I knew about, Drago says. But I had no idea I also gave up Billys last one.The Aaron homer came first, 40 years ago on July 20, 1976, in County Stadium, a solo homer deep to left in the seventh inning of the Milwaukee Brewers 6-2 victory. It was a hanging slider. I tried to get cute. Not the best inning of my career -- I gave up a homer to George Scott when Hank was in the on-deck circle. Other than that, I dont remember much, just him circling the bases and me fuming on the mound.When was the Williams home run?Aug. 8, an eighth-inning solo shot in a 9-3 loss to the Athletics in Oakland.I did give up a few. I guess its kind of a distinction that I gave up Hank Aarons last. You know, we signed balls together a few years ago. But Ive never seen the actual ball.Therein lies a tale. A part-time groundskeeper named Richard Arndt caught the ball in the bleachers. Not knowing its future significance, he just wanted to give the ball to Aaron and maybe have his picture taken. But he was told that Aaron was busy and that he should hand the ball over. When he refused, he was fired.Later that season, Arndt tried to get Aaron to sign the ball, but the legend balked, saying the ball belonged to him. Over the years, Arndt entertained various offers for the ball, even some from Aaron and the Brewers. He finally sold it to a Connecticut portfolio manager for $655,000, a large chunk of which he gave to Aarons Chasing the Dream Foundation. (What, nothing for the guy who hung the slider? Drago says.)That ball is now on loan to the museum, in a third-floor exhibit called Hank Aaron: Chasing The Dream.As for the Williams ball, Billy had it once. I threw it in my baseball bag, he says. The next year, I was in Midland, Texas, looking at some hitters for the Cubs, and a kid asked me if I had any baseballs. That was the only one I had to give him.Barry Bonds, No. 762. Bonds hit two balls worth a lot of money. The first was the one he hit to pass Aaron, No. 756, an Aug. 7, 2007, homer off Mike Bacsik of the Nationals. It was caught at AT&T Park by college student Matt Murphy and sold to fashion designer Mark Ecko for $752,467.20 so that he could make a statement by engraving an asterisk on it. Thats now housed on the third floor of the HOF museum, in an exhibit called One For The Books: Baseball Records and the Stories Behind Them.The second was the last home run ball of Bonds career, a two-run homer off rookie Ubaldo Jimenez in the first inning of the Giants 5-3 win in Colorado on Sept. 5, 2007. (Rockies outfielder Matt Holliday actually asked that the homer be negated because of fan interference. You decide.)The fan who emerged from the scrum with the ball was Jameson Sutton, who put the ball in a safe-deposit box in the hopes that it would be Bonds last waltz around the bases. When Bonds retired without another home run, collectors predicted that Sutton would get as much $1 million for the ball.He sold it that offseason to an unnamed collector through SCP Auctions for $376,612. Sutton used the money to pay off the medical expenses of his stepfather, who had just died after a battle with lung cancer.That ball is not in Cooperstown. It remains to be seen whether Bonds himself will be there.Babe Ruth, No. 714. It was May 25, 1935, and the 40-year-old Bambino waddled up to the plate for the truly dreadful Boston Braves on a chilly Saturday afternoon before 10,000 curious Pittsburgh fans in Forbes Field. No longer wanted by the Yankees -- firewood had been stored in his spring training locker and No. 3 had been given to George Selkirk -- he signed with the Braves, who needed a turnstile draw.He came into the game batting .183. But in the first inning, he hit a two-run homer into the right-field stands off Red Lucas. That was 712. He gave the Braves a 4-0 lead with another two-run shot, this one off Guy Bush, in the third -- 713. The Pirates tied the score, but Ruth put the Braves back ahead 5-4 with an RBI single in the fifth. In the top of the seventh, with the home team back ahead 7-5 but the crowd behind him, Ruth took a mighty swing at Bushs 3-1 pitch ... and launched it clear over the right-field roof. No batter had ever done that in the 26-year history of the park: 714.In an article for the Society of American Baseball Research, Jack Zerby described the scene thusly: After rounding the bases in a 1935 version of his classic trot, Babe saluted the fans with a tipped cap, and then excused himself from the game. Sole access to the visiting clubhouse was through the Pittsburgh dugout. En route, he plopped himself down at the end of the bench and told rookie Pirate pitcher Mace Brown, Boy, that last one felt good.After going 4-for-4 with three homers and six RBIs that day, Ruth played five more games, but he never got another hit.The ball that Ruth hit for No. 714 is now part of the Hall of Fames touring exhibit, We Are Baseball, which is at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City until Aug. 21. Then its on to St. Louis. Thats the thing about last home runs. Long after the batter touches home, the ball is still traveling. China Jerseys For Sale . This should be celebrated because it will not always be this way. With the amount of money given to players by their clubs these days, it is a wonder that so many of those teams allow the sport to continue to take away many of their assets so they can play for a different team in the middle of their season. China Jerseys NFL Authentic . -- Timbers coach Caleb Porter didnt stray from his business-like approach to the season even after Portland downed the two-time defending league champion Los Angeles Galaxy to gain crucial playoff position. http://www.chinajerseyspaypal.com/ . -- If this was Aaron Gordons final home game at Arizona, and it almost certainly was, then he went out in style. China Jerseys Paypal .In my heart and mind Im competing for India, luge competitor Shiva Keshavan told The Associated Press in an email interview. Every day Im flooded with messages from Indians all over the world telling me they are supporting me. China Jerseys website . The Cincinnati Reds remain perfect with their speedy rookie outfielder in the starting lineup. One of the very first cricket books I was ever given, on the occasion of my tenth birthday, was a slim black paperback called Great Australian Cricket Pictures (1975). When I retrieve it from the shelf now, it falls open at page 87, corroborative of my boyhood fascination with the image it contains.Trumpered read the bad-pun heading for the short caption, which described Victor Trumper as one of our truly great cricketers, told me that he was the first to score a century before lunch in a Test match, which proved to be true, and once hit the first ball of a match for six, which did not. Such was my simultaneous introduction to the first cricketer from history who ever registered with me and to what remains perhaps its oldest truly treasured image, in the context of assertion, fact and myth.I had also, though I would be unaware of it many more years, been introduced to the work of the pioneering Edwardian photographer George Beldam, in whose book Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (1905) the picture first appeared. Instead, as it almost invariably does, the photograph of Trumper in Great Australian Cricket Pictures appeared uncredited, undated, unaccounted for, as though it had taken itself - or even as though it wasnt a photograph at all, but a keyhole view of the past. When not long after, I commenced reading about Trumper, it can only have been with the image of him jumping out to drive in mind.That was then, of course, although now may be less different than we think. Nobodys found a great many more photographs of Trumper, or at least thought to make the others that do exist more readily available to the online browser. Todays ten-year-old would encounter Trumper pretty much the same way as I did, simultaneously with his most famous pictorial representation: google Victor Trumper, and one is led to the image. For the more mature fan, meanwhile, the image attests to the residual Trumper reputation, even if a good deal of the residual Trumper reputation is based on the image.When last year I first contemplated writing a book about Trumper, convention drew me towards a biography. Yet I also experienced misgivings. Three previous biographers had struggled to make much of him. The primary material was thin, his period remote, his contemporaries long gone, and the mythology thick indeed.To write about any figure of the past is essentially to make a claim for them, to make a mission of substantiating their significance. In sport, the allure is of great deeds, stirring victories, public approbation. Yet legend is an uneasy companion of biography, if not an outright enemy. And to track the Trumper story through the obligatory sources is a little like entering a hall of mirrors. Everyone is quoting everyone else. Stories and their origins have long since parted ways. One channels, instead, impressions. My excellently iconoclastic friend Jarrod Kimber wrote about Trumper in Test Cricket: The Unauthorised Biography last year in terms of which Neville Cardus would not have disapproved - and lets just say that these two writers would not normally be thought of as singing from the same song sheet.So I struck a kind of bargain with the past. If dealing with legend was inevitable, why not look it in the eye rather than try to peer around it? Why not evaluate knowingly what a conventional biography would be unavoidably transacting in anyway? After all, its one of my favourite lines of Chestertons: Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.That didnt mean ignoring fact. What became Stroke of Genius still needed extensive biographical underpinnings - partly to illustrate legends deviations, partly because Trumper has been gradually winnowed away to a name and an image. But I was anxious to avoid what so many works about cricket history seem to become - chronologies of scores, transcriptions of match reports, recitations of anecdote. Thats not only because these are seldom truly enlightening, but because so much now lies within reach of the interested reader. Want to find out Trumpers scores in 1903-04? Use CricketArchive. Want to read what people said about these scores? Try Trove or the British Newspaper Archive. In some ways, those of us enticed by crickets past have yet to adapt to the modern accessibility of informational riches. In any case, what differentiated Trumper was not his scores so much as their interpretation, the heights of lyricism ascended in describing him, and the remarkable unanimity of opinion, so that their evocation by a single image did not in the end seem so unnatural - indeed, it would steadily become proof of claims for his aesthetic superiority.Heading off down this track, I grew interested in how cricket was seen before World War I. Cricket, of course, is quite a challenging game to watch live, for reasons of distance and speed, without some kind of technological enhancement. Way back when, illustrative forms - painting, engraving, early photography - tended to reflect that. They hovered at the boundary edge, and perforce took in the whole scene. Classics of illustration - like WH Masons A Cricket Match between the Counties of Sussex and Kent, at Brighton and Ponsonby Staples An Imaginary Cricket Match - foregrounded the crowd and recessed the cricket. The Victorian Ages outstanding cricket photographic work, CW Alcocks Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds (1892), posed players for wistful portraits, and provided venues as tranquil panoramas. Intimacy with action was undreamed of - until George Beldam.Quite why Beldam is not better known amazes me. Perhaps it is because he is sui generis - he belongs to a leisure society swallowed up by World War I. He was an amateur cricketer, for Middlesex and London County, who doubled as an amateur photographer: indeed it was one of the passing intrigues of researching my book to learn that photography underwent debates similar to those in cricket about amateurism and professionalism. A century on, were apt to deem amateurism a kind of effete dabbling. In photography as in cricket, Beldam was a furiously industrious perfectionist. Between 1904 and 1908, he took thousands of photographs for eight works of sports photography, five of them substantial: not just cricket but tennis, golf and even jujitsu. Nor is this just a matter of versatility. He had the confidence of his caste and skill. Its not a coincidence that Beldam persuaded cricketers to do what they did for no other photographer: he was one of them, and as an amateur, atop crickets social heap.Beldam had the further cachet of a creative partnership with the eras arbiter elegentiae, CB Fry. Not only was Fry the finest flower of English amateur sport - batsman, footballer, rugby player, athlete, scholar - but a prolific journalist and editor of an eponymous magazine of outdoor recreation. Fry had both the Victorian fascination with technique and the Edwardian infatuation with style - which he defined with a Ruskinian formulation about the maximum effect for the least apparent effort. Long entranced by the unique elan and deftness of his Sussex and England team-mate Ranjitsinhji, Fry was captivated by a photograph that Beldam took of Ranji at Hove in September 1904.These were not action photographs as we would now understand them. To bridge that abiding gap between boundary edge and action, Beldam circulated among his subjects during practice sessions and at intervals; sometimes he invited them to his home, where he had the gentlemanly indulgence of an outdoor and indoor pitch. Photography being such a novelty, and the idea of a glimmer of action so alluring, few if any seemed to say no to him.The photograph of Ranji was one of a portfolio collected after a Middlesex v Sussex county match, in which Beldam hit the winning run, put on his blazer, fetched his camera, erected his tripod, and pressed Ranji into going through his repertoire to Frys bowling - not even Philip Brown has pulled that kind of thing off. One of the images is clearly kindred with the photograph Beldam was to take of Trumper - Ranji is prancing out to drive, eyes flashing, front foot in mid-air. Fry, who had previously expressed reservations about photography, felt them give way: the image took up a full page of the next issue of C. B. Frys Magazine of Action and Outdoor Life across from an appreciative exposition.Beldams collaborations with Fry, Great Batsmen (1905) and Great Bowlers and Fielders (1906), signify such a breakthrough in the representation of cricket that they might almost have been of another sport, given their departure from the traditions of the portrait and the panorama, and their accent on the capture of the figure in motion. They reverse, in fact, crickets existing descriptive grammar. It was the first time cricketers had been shown in close quarters in the physical performance of their deeds; it was the first time image had taken true precedence over text, Frys captions serving only to tease out what Beldams photographs introduced. In detail and comprehensiveness these companion volumes may never even have been equalled - certainly, but for them, we would have no idea what cricket looked like before World War I. You can spend countless hours poring over them. You can spend countless hours poring over one photograph alone - and I should know, because I did.In Great Batsmens section on Trumper there are no fewer than 33 photographs - more than for any other subject. They were accumulated across two sessions in 1905, at Lords and at The Oval, separated by roughly two weeks. Pare those sessions apart and they are fascinatingly distinct. The former are a wide range of shots taken from more or less the same front-of-the-wicket off-side position, with Beldam acting as bowler while taking the photographs by means of a pneumatic push connected to the camera by a long cord - we know this because it was included in a diary entry by the painter Henry Scott Tuke, who was present on the occasion. The latter are, in the main, attempts to capture one stroke, a straight drive, from a variety of positions in an arc from mid-on to about fourth slip - we can surmise this from a photograph of Beldam at work at The Oval photographing Clem Hill, and published the same week in a London illustrated paper. No contact sheet survives, but Beldams objective is apparent. He craves the sensse of motion conveyed by the airborne front foot, which he had succeeded in capturing while photographing Ranji the year before.dddddddddddd He craves it so badly that for a few plates he does something very unusual in his oeuvre: he adopts a landscape framing, wider than high, rather than a portrait shape.What becomes Plate XXVII: Jumping out for a straight drive, taken from side-on, is a photograph as audacious as the shot it immortalised. Trumper is launching from outside his ground: the crease is falling away at bottom left. Trumper is surging into light: the gap in the skyline caused by Clayton Street stretching away from The Oval. Trumper is alone in his estate: there are no stumps, no fielders, no square-leg umpire. Trumpers bat is poised at the moment of perfect stillness before commencing its downswing, which is foretold by the horizontals and verticals of the background, and the empty space at top right into which we can imagine the ball vanishing. You come to the photograph for Trumper, but part from it with as much admiration for Beldam.Whats almost as fascinating, especially in our present day and age, is that the photograph was not immediately identified as a classic, as distinct from simply of superior quality. Like the aforementioned image of Ranji and another of FS Jackson, it was offered as a limited edition photogravure. Yet none of them sold out. And while Great Batsmen and Great Bowlers and Fielders were critically acclaimed, they were too expensive to sell widely. Reprographic and communications technologies were inadequate for the broad diffusion of Beldams images - a hundred years ago the only things that went viral were… well, viruses.At the time this actually didnt matter: Trumper had no immediate need of pictorial elaboration. And in the annals of iconic photography, delayed appreciation is not unusual. On the recent death of Muhammad Ali, virtually every news outlet adorned their obituary with Neil Leifers 1964 image of all-conquering Ali towering over the prone form of Sonny Liston. Yet 52 years earlier, the photograph had been buried deep in the recesses of Sports Illustrated, garnered little attention, won no award. It was rediscovered only when people had forgotten that the fight itself was a squib, and that what looks like Alis bray of triumph was actually a demand that Liston, widely suspected of taking a dive, get up.To say, as I have heard it said, that Trumpers greatness is based on a photograph, therefore, is a gross oversimplification. At the time and in the earthly decade he had remaining, Trumper was not just hugely admired but deeply loved: contemporaneous responses to him have an emotional incandescence that I suspect is almost unique. He also remained a decided enigma - something excluded from almost every account of his life, for example, is that he was an obdurate resister of administrative encroachments on what had been to that stage a player-led game. Perhaps it is this that accounts for his perdurable and adaptable reputation, that by his reticence he kept it free of complication, and also that he died, in 1915, along with a great many more beautiful, comforting, transitory things.For the Anglosphere after World War I, memory was an exquisite self-torture. So much loss, so much waste and decay. Looking back on Trumper was at least only bittersweet. At first he was recalled chiefly in print. His extoller-in-chief, in an ecumenical gesture, was the rising star of English cricket writing, Neville Cardus, who wrote in the Manchester Guardian as Cricketer. Cardus, of course, sought pitches of eloquence never before attempted in cricket writing; central to his critique, too, was the irrefutable inferiority of the cricket of his adulthood, with its serried professional ranks, to the cricket of his youth, with its confident amateur leadership. Of the latter, Trumper became the personification, unsullied and un-ageing. And it was in an elegy for Trumper in July 1926 that Cardus first trialled an evocative expression: Trumpers winged batsmanship was seen in the golden age of cricket [my italics]; he was, at his finest, master of some of the greatest bowlers the game has ever known.It was a conception Cardus would expand, burnish, celebrate and mourn the rest of his lengthy career. By the 1940s it had been entrenched by upper cases for G and A; by the 1960s it had been historicised by book-length treatments. Trumper did not hold the Golden Age up by itself. But by being Australian, being beautiful and being dead, he gave it a roundness and completedness that made it sound like more than an assuagement of fading class certainties.Then, in October 1927, fully 22 years after it was taken, Beldams photograph of Trumper was published for the first time in Australia, in the Sydney Mail, a popular weekly published on art paper. Whose decision it was we do not know, but it almost certainly involved the papers brilliant English-born pictorial editor, Herbert Fishwick. There were no jpegs and tifs: the Mail relied on a copy of the gravure taken down from the wall of the New South Wales Cricket Association, still reproduced a little hazily. But the caption writers excitement was unfeigned.Victor! To look at this picture (kindly lent by the N.S.W. Cricket Association) is to see Victor Trumper as we used to see him from the pavilions. See him and marvel! It does not show his face clearly, but as an action picture it is wonderful. No hesitancy here. He is stepping out to meet the ball. Strength, grace, and balance, combine to reveal joyous and youthful sense of mastery. What was the secret of this joyous freedom? Simply the beautiful character of Victor. All young players should know all that can be told of him, whose other name was Modesty.The odd thing is that had I elected to write a conventional biography of Trumper, Id have left him in 1915, when his definition and significance were still far from clear. As it is, Trumper took on a new, posthumous effulgence from the late 1920s, abetted by his image, which slipped seamlessly into a mass media with an expanding pictorial quotient. The year after the Sydney Mail published the photograph, it published Fishwicks stirring action portrait of Walter Hammond cover-driving - a perfect counterpart, in a way, the Englishman in Australia to balance the Australian in England as they helped establish an aesthetic continuum. But a greater influence still, I suspect, was just hoving into view. We tend to think now of Donald Bradman as becoming the monopolist of cricket fame from the 1930s, arising as he did in the age of radio, the wire photo, and a ceaselessly expanding newspaper and publishing industry. Yet Trumper was kept flickeringly alive by all those with reservations about the onrush of modernity, materialism, industrialisation and professionalism that Bradman embodied. Originating his dichotomy of Trumper as the bird in flight and Bradman as the aeroplane, Cardus could now flourish the most modern of empirical proofs. Look at the photographs of him [Trumper], doubting young Thomases of the skeptical present, and see how far he would venture beyond the creases rim at the sight of a well-tossed ball, Cardus wrote in Cricket (1930). His bat is held up behind him punitively, he is leaping to the ball, his every muscle responding to the demands of the will to power and victory. Administrators discomfited by Bradmans popular heft also looked back fondly: in 1930, the NSWCA placed a line drawing inspired by Beldams Trumper on the cover of its yearbook, where it remained 25 years.As deeply as Bradman interred his precursors records, then, he preserved a role for Trumper as a kind of romantic counterpoint to his overpowering rationalism. And while Trumper receded perhaps from the very front rank of fame, his spirit remained available for reproachment of modern mores, from joyless professionalism to flamboyant entrepreneurship. Trumpers centenary happened to fall on the eve of Kerry Packers World Series Cricket. The first public duty of Australias establishment captain Bob Simpson was to place a wreath on Trumpers grave - somewhat of an irony given that Trumper had so frequently been at loggerheads with the establishment of his own generation.In the generation or so since that centenary, the image has evolved further, and almost shaken off its subject: it is Trumper, the equivalent of an artist known by a single work, or even a public man by a solitary, resonant, if only partially grasped, idea or phrase, like, in Australia, AA The Cultural Cringe Phillips, or Donald The Lucky Country Horne. The concluding chapter of Stroke of Genius, which could easily have been several times as long, is concerned with the appropriation of the photograph as a free-floating art object. It turned out, for example, that the owner of the most superb representation, Louis Laumens one-and-a-quarter times life-size bronze of the image, has no interest in cricket: he is a collector who had some spare cash.The basis of iconoclasm as it was originally understood was the objection that icons had heretical powers to destroy the divine presence - that they, rather than what they represent, become the object of veneration. Perhaps in a secular and sporting sense, this is the fate that has befallen Victor Trumper, effaced by his own image, reduced at times simply to a leap, so that every ESPNcricinfo reader knows what is meant when it is said that Victor Trumper would have been proud of AB de Villiers or a youth batting near Premadasa Stadium is making a salute to Victor Trumper. Yet to complain of this would be pernickety. It is the image that has kept for Trumper an irreducible corner of this visual age, that brings him effortlessly up to date every time we see it. For all that Bradman is Australian crickets historical lodestar, no photographer ever succeeded in obtaining his aesthetic signature as Beldam did with Trumper. Without Beldams photograph, Trumper would be no more than a distant name with a fading echo, a statistical remnant buried deep beneath a centurys further achievement. And without Beldams photograph, I doubt Trumpers name would ever have detained me at an impressionable age, and lodged in my mind to the degree that I wished to write a book about him. ' ' '