Subject: it ain't the Yankees that need help
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 02:24:04 GMT
Every so often, this friendly & diverting rendez-vous
is overwhelmed with sports chat. It's like sitting in
your garden & watching some rank, invasive weed
come writhing over the wall threatening the very life
of all the other plants.
But there's evidently no permanent cure since this whole
sports culture seems to be twined into the basic psychology
of American/Canadian intellectuals in a way that's
quite strange to the rest of us on this side of the Atlantic.
We even have the pale faced, rabbinical Salinger quoted
now as a would-be baseball champ. (It's less surprising that
for the last few days the Hemingway list has been swamped
with a 'Hemingway & Baseball' thread. Something of the sort
recurs every few weeks.)
In Europe, it's common enough for celebrities trying to
strengthen their standing with the plebs to assert their love
of soccer or cricket or whatever. This, they hope, will make
them look more endearingly human. The Queen turns up
at football finals or you have Tony Blair claiming claiming
childhood adoration of some chap who hadn't even been
hired at the time. Very, very rarely some egghead gives
evidence of a genuine interest in a game - Pinter's cricket eleven,
or my old buddy David Storey's career in Rugby league.
But, by an large, crowds going to watch grown men propelling
leather balls around fields are dismissed as the lower orders
at their brutish pleasures - much as Caesar dismissed them
with their bread & games.
I'll bet people can find lots of exceptions but, to me,
the thought of Tom Hardy or Marcel Proust or Hank James
or Evelyn Waugh or JP Sartre (OK, Camus used to play
a bit of footer) or Lev Tolstoy or the Mann boys or
Ginny Wolfe or - Jesus, I could go on all night - waving
their rattles for Manchester United is something from
Monty Python.
Yet we're told that sports writing is one of the great roots
of modern American literature - look, there's Ring Lardner
with Uncle Ernie & Norman M. togged out in their boxing
gear, standing just beside Jerry & Tim & Paul, each one
wearing his mitt….
Why is this? What happens to little American boys
that they turn out like that? Is it the milk? Or the need
to reassure Mom with one's healthy innocence?
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sun Oct 01 2000 - 14:44:36 GMT