Lost Canvas Season 2

[Amatista Sheeley]

Its a winning streak that first got Oakland off the bubble for even making the Horizon League tournament field, and eventually earned the Golden Grizzlies the No. 3 seed and, thus, a home game in the opening round, in which they narrowly dispatched Youngstown State to advance to the tournaments semifinals.

"Personally, I've always felt our lack of success in the tournament, I think, hurt it," said Kampe, who, despite high expectations, never got to the championship game in Detroit. "I feel half to blame it didn't work here. A couple more wins by us and I'm sure they would've made a lot more money. I feel bad about that."

In 2016, No. 2 Oakland got a double-bye into the semifinals, and was upset by Wright State. In 2017, No. 1 Oakland was stunned by No. 9 Youngstown State on a last-second shot in the quarterfinals. And in 2018, No. 4 Oakland was upset by No. 8 Cleveland State in the semifinals.

"In February at their place, I thought we had cut the margin. Even though they beat us, I thought we cut the margin in half," said Kampe, who felt from the beginning of the season that Northern Kentucky, led by league player of the year Drew McDonald, was the class of the Horizon League. "Now we've had another month. We've improved. We know each other. We've gotten better. We're gonna find out if we've cut the margin again. We'll see if we got to equal them, or better them."

During the five-game winning streak, Oakland has had five players score in double-figures in three of the games, and four in the other two games. That's big progress from early in the season, when if Hill-Mais didn't go off in the scoring department, the Golden Grizzlies almost always lost.

"I want to get to every championship game, but deep inside, the feeling I have over what's happened in Detroit, that's something that will never leave me," Kampe said. "The funny thing in this business, everybody always asks what your best wins are. You expect those things. It's those disappointments that haunt you. I'll go to my grave thinking about Kay Felder's ball rolling around the rim against Michigan State (at The Palace in 2015, when Oakland lost in overtime).

A couple of months later, I rode my bike down the same hill. As I passed a house a block north of a stop sign, I saw two kids playing catch in the yard. Suddenly, my eye caught an image that looked very familiar. I leaped off my bike and ran to them, asking where they got the glove.

By now I could see the signature Tony Conigliaro marking the tan leather with its black etching. The boy holding my glove admitted that he had found it on the sidewalk. He offered no resistance when I grabbed it back. It was like finding a lost love.

I played lots of baseball with that glove. From a season at third base for the seventh- and eighth-grade team to my last season of baseball at Grinnell College in Iowa, where I used the mitt in both the infield and the outfield.

But my link to that Conigliaro glove stayed strong well into adulthood. When I gave up baseball, I adopted softball. I played in intramural leagues in college, in grad school and at work. In the summer after my sophomore year of college, I devoted long Sunday afternoons to pick-up games at Eden Theological Seminary, a bike ride from where my glove once vanished.

I will never forget the summer of 1988, when for weeks the mercury crested 100 degrees. It was so hot in Terre Haute, Indiana, where I was a professor, that I kept my car windows down; my red Renault Encore had sticky vinyl seats and no air conditioning.

I was playing in a campus co-ed softball league, and after the sultry games, which soaked my shirt with sweat, the team would drop by a pub. One evening, with the hot sun still baking the streets and the cars, I pulled into a spot around the corner from the bar. On the floor of the backseat, my canvas bag held a Timex watch, a damp towel, my wet T-shirt, and my Tony Conigliaro glove, which I had depended on and loved for 20 years. Next to it lay a plastic Kroger bag bulging with trash.

"For the art lover you know, look to Jonathan Harr's nonfiction narrative about the search for a lost Caravaggio masterpiece," recommends book critic Alan Cheuse in his annual holiday roundup for All Things Considered.

The Englishman moves in a slow but deliberate shuffle, knees slightly bent and feet splayed, as he crosses the piazza, heading in the direction of a restaurant named Da Fortunato. The year is 2001. The Englishman is ninety-one years old. He carries a cane, the old-fashioned kind, wooden with a hooked handle, although he does not always use it. The dome of his head, smooth as an eggshell, gleams pale in the bright midday Roman sun. He is dressed in his customary manner-a dark blue double-breasted suit, hand tailored on Savile Row more than thirty years ago, and a freshly starched white shirt with gold cuff links and a gold collar pin. His hearing is still sharp, his eyes clear and unclouded. He wears glasses, but then he has worn glasses ever since he was a child. The current pair are tortoiseshell and sit cockeyed on his face, the left earpiece broken at the joint. He has fashioned a temporary repair with tape. The lenses are smudged with his fingerprints.

Da Fortunato is located on a small street, in the shadow of the Pantheon. There are tables outside, shaded by a canopy of umbrellas, but the Englishman prefers to eat inside. The owner hurries to greet him and addresses him as Sir Denis, using his English honorific. The waiters all call him Signore Mahon. He speaks to them in Italian with easy fluency, although with a distinct Etonian accent.

Sir Denis takes a single glass of red wine with lunch. A waiter recommends that he try the grilled porcini mushrooms with Tuscan olive oil and sea salt, and he agrees, smiling and clapping his hands together. "It's the season!" he says in a high, bright voice to the others at his table, his guests. "They are ever so good now!"

When in Rome he always eats at Da Fortunato, if not constrained by invitations to dine elsewhere. He is a man of regular habits. On his many visits to the city, he has always stayed at the Albergo del Senato, in the same corner room on the third floor, with a window that looks out over the great smoke-grayed marble portico of the Pantheon. Back home in London, he lives in the house in which he was born, a large redbrick Victorian townhouse in the quiet, orderly confines of Cadogan Square, in Belgravia. He was an only child. He has never married, and he has no direct heirs. His lovers-on this subject he is forever discreet-have long since died.

Around the table, the topic of conversation is an artist who lived four hundred years ago, named Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Sir Denis has studied, nose to the canvas, magnifying glass in hand, every known work by the artist. Since the death of his rival and nemesis, the great Italian art scholar Roberto Longhi, Sir Denis has been regarded as the world's foremost authority on Caravaggio. Nowadays, younger scholars who claim the painter as their domain will challenge him on this point or that, as he himself had challenged Longhi many years ago. Even so, he is still paid handsome sums by collectors to render his opinion on the authenticity of disputed works. His verdict can mean a gain or loss of a small fortune for his clients.

To his great regret, Sir Denis tells his luncheon companions, he's never had the chance to own a painting by Caravaggio. For one thing, fewer than eighty authentic Caravaggios-some would argue no more than sixty-are known to exist. Several were destroyed during World War II, and others have simply vanished over the centuries. A genuine Caravaggio rarely comes on the market.

Sir Denis began buying the works of Baroque artists in the 1930s, when the ornate frames commanded higher prices at auction than the paintings themselves. Over the years he has amassed a virtual museum of seicento art in his house at Cadogan Square, seventy-nine masterpieces, works by Guercino, Guido Reni, the Carracci brothers, and Domenichino. He bought his last painting in 1964. By then, prices had begun to rise dramatically. After two centuries of disdain and neglect, the great tide of style had shifted, and before Sir Denis's eyes, the Italian Baroque had come back into fashion.

And no artist of that era has become more fashionable than Caravaggio. Any painting by him, even a small one, would be worth today many times the price of Sir Denis's finest Guercino. "A Caravaggio? Perhaps now as much as forty, fifty million English pounds," he says with a small shrug. "No one can say for certain."

He orders a bowl of wild strawberries for dessert. One of his guests asks about the day, many years ago, when he went in search of a missing Caravaggio. Sir Denis smiles. The episode began, he recalls, with a disagreement with Roberto Longhi, who in 1951 had mounted the first exhibition in Milan of all known works by Caravaggio. Sir Denis, then forty-one years old and already known for his eye, spent several days at the exhibition studying the paintings. Among them was a picture of St. John the Baptist as a young boy, from the Roman collection of the Doria Pamphili family. No one had ever questioned its authenticity. But the more Sir Denis looked at the painting, the more doubtful he became. Later, in the files of the Archivio di Stato in Rome, he came across the trail of another version, one he thought more likely to be the original.

He went looking for it one day in the winter of 1952. Most likely it was morning, although he does not recall this with certainty. He walked from his hotel at a brisk pace-he used to walk briskly, he says-through the narrow, cobbled streets still in morning shadow, past ancient buildings with their umber-colored walls, stained and mottled by centuries of smoke and city grime, the shuttered windows flung open to catch the early sun. He would have worn a woolen overcoat against the damp Roman chill, and a hat, a felt fedora, he believes. He dressed back then as he dresses now-a starched white shirt with a high, old-fashioned collar, a tie, a double-breasted suit-although in those days he carried an umbrella instead of the cane.

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