Return of the Natural

A few initial observations are in order here. First, I love baseball; second, I don't care at all for Barry Bonds, and will always regard his home-run record as tainted and bogus; and third, one of my all-time favorite movies is "The Natural." And then there is my oft-repeated musing that we are not distinguished by the problems we deal with in life as much as we are by how we choose to deal with them.

With all of that in mind, I found this column by Charles Krauthammer in today's edition of Jewish World Review, one of the ten or so websites I habitually visit every day. The story he tells here is wonderful, but I also enjoyed his anecdote about Ronald Reagan and "The Natural," which apparently was one of his favorites, too. (Parenthetically, I have read the Bernard Malamud novel upon which the film is based, and I definitely prefer the movie. Ronald Reagan could not understand why, in the movie, the woman shot Roy Hobbs. For my part, I could not understand why, in the novel, Hobbs strikes out in that climactic final scene, whereas in the movie he smashes a home run for the ages.)