NY Mets 50th Aniversary Celebration

Here is an exerpt from a wonderful article in the April 27th 2012 issue of The New Yorker magazine. RHS alumna Judy Van Sickle recently spoke at Hofstra University during a conference celebrating the NY Mets 50th anniversary. She makes a truly inspired literary comparison in her talk. She juxtaposes the love played out between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, in one of my favorite novels, The Great Gatsby, with the return of star athlete Jose Reyes to his original team. Judy no doubt helped to mend the hearts of every discouraged Met fan in attendance and taught them a bit of how life can imitate literature.

"Judy Van Sickle Johnson, a former English teacher at Phillips Academy, presented “Literature, the New York Mets, and the Tug of Baseball.” She summed up Reyes’s return with a local literary comparison:

It’s a little like Jay Gatsby seeing Daisy Buchanan again—the woman he loved so passionately and innocently in his youth, hated losing, and now she’s back in his life, as beautiful as ever. But she doesn’t really want him anymore, and he can’t have her. It’s a bittersweet experience—the love he feels for her is still genuine and it’s still there, but his affection is mixed with the ache of longing and the sting of loss."

In “The Great Gatsby,” Fitzgerald described a stretch of wasteland along West Egg as a “valley of ashes.” Since 1964, the Mets have called that spot home. Read more:

The Mets Go to School