Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

“Kennedy is a writer with something to say, about matters that touch us all, and he says it with uncommon artistry”

Washington Post

“Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption”

Wall Street Journal

“Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an
all-too-actual city”

The New York Review of Books

“His smart, sassy dialogue conveys volumes about character. His scene setting makes the city throb with life”

Newsday

“What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany, New York: created a rich and vivid world invisible to the ordinary
eye”

Vanity Fair

“His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny”

Time

“William Kennedy’s
Albany Cycle
is one of the great achievements of modern American writing”

Daily Mail

“William Kennedy is pre-eminent among his generation of writers . . . Kennedy is peerless in the depth and acuity of his sustained vision, and the lost, past world of
Albany says more to us today about the current state, about the heart and soul, of American politics than any recent bestselling, Hollywood-pandering political thriller has ever done”

Spectator

“Kennedy’s writing is a triumph: he tackles topics in a gloriously comic, almost old-fashioned language. You feel Kennedy could write the Albany phone book and make
it utterly entertaining”

Time Out

“Kennedy proves to be truly Shakespearean”

The Sunday Times

“Kennedy is one of our necessary writers”

GQ

ALSO BY WILLIAM KENNEDY

The Ink Truck

Legs

Ironweed

Quinn’s Book

Very Old Bones

The Flaming Corsage

Roscoe

Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

O Albany!

Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine

Charley Malarkey and the Singing Moose

First published in the USA by Viking Press 1978
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © William Kennedy, 1978

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of William Kennedy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X8HB

www.simonandschuster.co.uk

Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, Delhi

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-84983-854-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-855-9

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CRo 4YY

For Brendan Christopher Kennedy, a nifty kid

The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start.

–
JOHAN HUIZINGA

-
CARL JUNG

Because the city of Albany exists in the real world, readers may be led to believe that the characters who populate the Albany in this book are therefore real people. But there
are no authentically real people in these pages. Some local and national celebrities are so indelibly connected to the era of the story that it would have been silly not to present them under their
real names. But wherever a character has a role of even minor significance in this story, both name and actions are fictional. Any reality attaching to any character is the result of the
author’s creation, or of his own interpretation of history. This applies not only to Martin Daugherty and Billy Phelan, to Albany politicians, newsmen, and gamblers, but also to Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Thomas E. Dewey, Henry James, Damon Runyon, William Randolph Hearst, and any number of other creatures of the American imagination.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Martin Daugherty, age fifty and now the scorekeeper, observed it all as Billy Phelan, working on a perfect game, walked with the arrogance of a young, untried eagle toward the
ball return, scooped up his black, two-finger ball, tossed it like a juggler from right to left hand, then held it in his left palm, weightlessly. Billy rubbed his right palm and fingers on the
hollow cone of chalk in the brass dish atop the ball rack, wiped off the excess with a pull-stroke of the towel. He faced the pins, eyed his spot down where the wood of the alley changed color, at
a point seven boards in from the right edge. And then, looking to Martin like pure energy in shoes, he shuffled: left foot, right foot, left-right-left and slide, right hand pushing out, then back,
like a pendulum, as he moved, wrist turning slightly at the back of the arc. His arm, pure control in shirtsleeves to Martin, swung forward, and the ball glided almost silently down the polished
alley, rolled through the seventh board’s darkness, curving minimally as it moved, curving more sharply as it neared the pins, and struck solidly between the headpin and the three pin,
scattering all in a jamboree of spins and jigs.

“Attaway, Billy,” said his backer, Morrie Berman, clapping twice. “Lotta mix, lotta mix.”

“Ball is working all right,” Billy said.

Billy stood long-legged and thin, waiting for Bugs, the cross-eyed pinboy, to send back the ball. When it snapped up from underneath the curved wooden ball return, Billy lifted it off, faced the
fresh setup on alley nine, shuffled, thrust, and threw yet another strike: eight in a row now.

Martin Daugherty noted the strike on the scoresheet, which showed no numbers, only the eight strike marks: bad luck to fill in the score while a man is still striking. Martin was already
thinking of writing his next column about this game, provided Billy carried it off. He would point out how some men moved through the daily sludge of their lives and then, with a stroke, cut away
the sludge and transformed themselves. Yet what they became was not the result of a sudden act, but the culmination of all they had ever done: a triumph for self-development, the end of something
general, the beginning of something specific.

To Martin, Billy Phelan, on an early Thursday morning in late October, 1938, already seemed more specific than most men. Billy seemed fully defined at thirty-one (the age when Martin had been
advised by his father that he was a failure).

Billy was not a half-bad bowler: 185 average in the K. of C. league, where Martin bowled with him Thursday nights. But he was not a serious match for Scotty Streck, who led the City League, the
fastest league in town, with a 206 average. Scotty lived with his bowling ball as if it were a third testicle, and when he found Billy and Martin playing eight ball at a pool table in the Downtown
Health and Amusement Club, the city’s only twenty-four-hour gamester’s palace, no women, no mixed leagues, please, beer on tap till 4:00
A.M.
, maybe 5:00, but no
whiskey on premises, why then Scotty’s question was: Wanna bowl some jackpots, Billy? Sure, with a twenty-pin spot, Billy said. Give you fifty-five for three games, offered the Scotcheroo.
Not enough, but all right, said Billy, five bucks? Five bucks fine, said Scotty.

And so it was on, with the loser to pay for the bowling, twenty cents a game. Scotty’s first game was 212. Billy turned in a sad 143, with five splits, too heavy on the headpin, putting
him sixty-nine pins down, his spot eliminated.