Subject: Re: it ain't the Yankees that need help
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 29 2000 - 11:31:38 GMT
On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 07:24:04AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> 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.)
I don't know how to explain it except to say that in America, sports
metaphors have soaked their way into the popular consciousness in a
cross-generational way that other cultural markers (movies, music,
television) have not. And on top of that, for reasons that elude me,
baseball and boxing have become the sports of choice for "thinkers" in
the literary arena, leading in the U.S. to books by the likes of
George Plimpton, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Nick Tosches,
Roger Angell, Marianne Moore, and many others, all concentrated on
some aspect of one or the other angles of these sports.
> 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.
I never really got the sense, in the U.S., that writers putting on a
show of their love of a given sport were doing it to pander to the
public. Because arguably not a single "egghead" sports book has
broken through to become a popular success. I think it's more that
both baseball and boxing lend themselves to mythmaking an analogy, and
writers love analogy.
> 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?
I can't speak for anyone else, but there's something reassuring to sit
in that impossibly green arena and watch a game that's so quaint in
its own way, and innocent in its own way. I can't describe the
feeling of peace it offers me.
I leave it to Paul and Will to offer their own explanations....
--tim
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