Tom Hanks and Typewriters

How my favorite actor ended up writing the foreword for BIG FAN.

BIG FAN comes out in just four days, and Mike and I are doing a bajillion interviews that will be coming out over the next couple of weeks (the first, our interview with Awful Announcing, just came out) — apparently, we’re going to be on Morning Joe Monday, which is bananas. We’re also going to be on Seth Meyers on June 10, which is even wilder.

Anyway, it’s clear from the early interviews that people want to know: How the heck did you guys get Tom Hanks to write the foreword to BIG FAN?

Here’s that story:

If you’re a long-time reader, you already know that two and a half years ago, I was in Los Angeles for some reason or another, and I got a call from Margo. The call, in my memory, went like so:

Margo: You just got a letter, and I’m opening it.

Me: I believe that’s a federal offense.

Margo: I don’t care. I’m opening it.

Me: Who is it from?

Margo: I’m opening it RIGHT NOW.

She opened it, and inside was a scroll — a literal four-foot scroll — of typewritten joy. It was the most wonderful and elaborate fan letter I have ever received. And, yes, it was from Tom Hanks.

I was reminded of this now-framed scroll at the end of Wednesday’s glorious Stephen Colbert interview with Tom (I think I can call him Tom?), when he gave Colbert a box of connected dot matrix paper and a typewriter.

This letter came completely out of nowhere. I had not met Tom Hanks. I still have not met Tom Hanks. But it was such a beautiful letter — he talked about his love of baseball, his history as a fan, his appreciation of my work. I often think of the Albert Brooks line in “Broadcast News” when William Hurt asked him what you do when your life surpasses your dreams.

“Keep it to yourself,” Brooks said.

Funny! But wrong! Well, anyway, I think it’s wrong. When your life surpasses your dreams, you owe it to yourself and also the world to celebrate it, because it’s such a rare thing … and maybe, hopefully, it reminds us all that it can happen, impossibly good things can happen, and sometimes when you least expect it.

Anyway, I was in the clouds for days and then wrote back to Tom on my own typewriter, and he wrote back to me, and I wrote back to him, and he wrote back to me, and I wrote back to him, and so on, until it became clear that I had officially become pen pals with Tom Hanks. Let me repeat again: I’ve never met him. I don’t have any of his contact information other than the P.O. Box address for his Playtone production company. This will come up again in a moment.

Just before Mike and I started writing BIG FAN, I sent Tom a letter telling him about the book. Well, as I recall, that was sort of an aside in a letter that was more about some baseball questions he had asked and manual typewriters.

That’s when he sent me a letter about his fandom — about how he fell in love with hockey, how he fell in love with Aston Villa, how his sports fandom had defined his life and, yes, the life of his family. It was (and is) an utterly remarkable letter. I sent a copy of it to Mike for two reasons. One, I thought it could serve as a compass for how we wrote the book. And two, I wanted him to know that I got another letter from TOM HANKS! Mike has actually met Tom on a couple of occasions because Mike’s a big Hollywood legend and all that. But he has never gotten a letter from him!

Anyway, in a couple of the letters, Tom invited me to come to Los Angeles and go to a baseball game with him. Well, this was a wonderful offer, obviously, but it was particularly compelling for a very specific reason: When Mike and I decided to write the book, one of the first things we decided was that we should give each other a dream chapter as a gift. That is to say: We should each get to do something we’d always wanted to do as fans, something dear to our hearts, and write about it.

Mike immediately knew what his dream would be: He’s a lifelong Liverpool fan but had never been to Anfield. So we set it up for us to go to Liverpool for a match against Manchester United, which we went on a miserably cold and icy day, and it was every bit as glorious as you would hope: It’s one of my favorite chapters in the book.

I had a harder time coming up with a dream chapter because, as mentioned, my life has in so many ways already surpassed my dreams. I’ve covered most of the biggest sporting events on six continents in my absurdly lucky career. But then it hit me: What if I could go to a baseball game with my favorite all-time actor, Tom Hanks? I mean, it was an open invitation! This would be incredible!

So I did the only thing I knew how to do: I wrote to Tom with the idea.

And then, like a 19th-century debutante, I waited for him to write back by post.

Me: Any word?

Butler: Not yet, m’lord, but I’m sure he will respond.

Me: You really think so?

Butler: I feel sure of it. This is the man who played both Forrest Gump and Jimmy Dugan.

Me: Yes. Those are very different men, indeed.

Tom did respond. He invited me to join him in his box on Opening Day. It was amazing. It was also, as mentioned, sent by mail, so I received the letter two weeks after Opening Day. In so many ways, that was perfect. I ended up choosing a different dream — I went to see the best card magician in the world, Dani DaOrtiz, perform the greatest card trick in the world, Any Card, Any Number. It was brilliant.

A couple of weeks after that, Mike called and said, “Do you think Tom would let us use the letter he sent you as our foreword? A fan letter to open BIG FAN?” It was an amazing idea, not simply because it was a letter from Tom Hanks — though, of course, that doesn’t hurt — but because it was such a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be a fan.

I somehow got word to Tom — this time through a mutual friend; I didn’t really trust the timeliness of mail — and he said yes immediately, which is amazing. And now his letter is there for everybody to enjoy. What a world! What a life!

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I imagine you saw the New York Times’ thirty greatest living American songwriters — and maybe you have seen some of the furious reaction to the list. As the author of The Baseball 100 and Why We Love Baseball — and someone who can’t really go many places without someone yelling at me for leaving Jim Palmer or the Rick Monday flag rescue or something off my lists — the reaction felt familiar to me. But, I mean, that’s why you do these lists, right? You do them to celebrate greatness. And you do them to get people to engage, to respond, to consider what greatness means.

Hey, I didn’t love the Times’ list either.

But the best thing I’ve seen on the list was written by my friend Brian, who has a wonderful new newsletter called The Greatest Show, Man, where he celebrates the absolute wonder of music, particularly in East Nashville, where he lives.

Brian loves music more than anyone I know. He has spent his entire career in music, working for labels and managing acts and so on, but his love of music goes so much deeper than that. He goes to a show (at least one) pretty much every night. He is constantly pushing to find new music, something that is hard to do for 60-somethings. Anyway, he writes about the good things about the list, and he writes about his dear friend Lucinda Williams, and if you love music or want to find your love of music, I think you’ll get a huge kick out of his free newsletter.