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"  I watched the World Series with Frank McCourt once. Game Three of the Subway Series, and for a roomful of drunk Irish men, he had the familiarity of a sober WASP woman (if there is such a thing) with baseball. And yet he had more to say about the game than any of us: a fondness for Benny Agbayani, the journeyman Mets left fielder who hit the game-winner; a running fictional account of El Duque&amp;#039;s climb from Cuban backyard to Yankee Stadium; wisecracks about the name of pinch-hitter Bubba Trammell; a fist pump when Derek Jeter struck out.  He was, for that night and for much of his later life, one of us and kind of beyond us at the same time. Because Frank McCourt was a journeyman who climbed to the Yankee Stadium of literary lore, who wisecracked and stuck it to the man with all the drunken Irish grace of a favorite English teacher living a very much miserable life until he wasn&amp;#039;t. He was all of these things, but he was above all a connecter \u2014 able to notice the things very much personal to him and occasionally common to us all, and bring them together. Angela&amp;#039;s Ashes, of course, was for a time the united front \u2014 our national childhood-misery-turned-success story. The man was enough like us that we could ignore just how miserable his life had been by anointing his the greatest memoir of our time. But if you go back and try to skim it again, as I did last night, you can&amp;#039;t ignore anything. It connects our miseries but triumphs our will, and for that Frank McCourt was nothing like us at all. He was the ultimate underdog. RELATED LINKS:  FROM THE ARCHIVE: A Joke About Death by Frank McCourt  BOOKS OF THE DECADE: Angela&amp;#039;s Ashes on Our 90s List "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6080/frank-mccourt-obituary-072009/>