Inside a shopping mall in Fargo, North Dakota there is a museum dedicated to the memory of Roger Maris, one-time star of the New York Yankees and home run champion of baseball. When I visited in the mid-1990s I thought it was the saddest museum I had ever seen. The reason it lurks in the entrance to a mall - just a few glass-fronted displays of old shirts, balls and assorted memorabilia for people to glance at on their way to spend money on something else - is that Maris made it clear before his death from lymphoma at the age of 51 that he didn't want anyone to make a fuss. They had made a fuss of him once before, and he hadn't liked it at all.

LRB 3 August 2006 | PDF Download