it ain't the Yankees that need help


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.

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