Good Sports

“This game’s supposed to be fun, goddammit, fun.”   —Bull Durham

Growing up in northern New Jersey my brothers and I were naturally Yankees fans and… Minnesota Vikings fans. Allow me to explain. In the early seventies, when we were little kids, the first pro football game my older brother ever saw was the 1971 Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Minnesota Vikings. My brother thought the Vikes’ uniforms looked cool so he became a Vikings fan and my younger brother, my best friend and I followed his lead. Plus the Giants and Jets were terrible and my brief infatuation with the Jets ended when Joe Namath left.

My dad, who was not a sports fan, was disgusted when he discovered his sons were Yankees’ fans. “Its like rooting for IBM,” he said, accusing us of being frontrunners. What he didn’t understand was at the time we became Yankees fans(1973) they were emerging from a decade-worth of failure.  We watched them struggle to become competitive only get crushed in a four-game World Series sweep in 1976 by the Cincinnati Reds, the Big Red Machine. Sure the Yankees went on to win the Series in 1977 and 1978 but you have to remember we were also Minnesota Vikings fans. We got to watch them lose two Super Bowls to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders,  in addition to their prior Super Bowl losses to the Miami Dolphins and  Kansas City Chiefs. It helped that we were big fans of Peanuts and Charlie Brown. The comic strip showed failure and misery as part and parcel of childhood, sports, and life itself. A person’s only defense was to turn suffering into comedy.

I spent the greater part of my childhood playing games with my two brothers John and Jim and my best friend, Harry. John was the oldest by three years, Harry and me were the same age, and Jim was the youngest by two years. Harry lived right across the street and we were in and out of each other’s houses constantly. He was like an extra brother since he spent almost as much time with my brothers as he did with me. We played football in the fall, basketball and street hockey in the winter, and softball, wiffleball  in the summer.

We started playing tackle football with helmets and shoulder pads when I was six, me and Harry versus my two brothers. Harry and I never won—not one time in five years—and yet we’d still go out there. The problem was “match-ups” as TV commentators would say today.  My older brother was bigger and stronger than the rest of us and my younger brother was quicker than Harry, who was game but chubby and slow.

You have to love football to get your butt kicked for five straight years—and I guess we did–but sometimes it got to be too much and I’d quit. John would chase me into the house and I’d get my butt kicked for real. We had some epic battles growing up, one time rolling over a wooden floor lamp and destroying it in a vicious cartoon furball of a fight. On another occasion, Harry and Jim came in to watch us and John and I stopped fighting momentarily to chase them out of the room before resuming our battle. Good times. It was quite a relief to me when I started playing Pop Warner football with kids my age.

Wintertime meant basketball in Harry’ s driveway. We made up phantom teams with imaginary players we’d impersonate. The teams had themes. Harry loved to eat so he had “The Food” with players like “Ketchup” and “Mustard”. When he became “Fried Chicken” he was tough to beat.  Fried Chicken could hit shots underhanded all over the court.  John’s team  was the “UFOs” which were mostly birds. His star players were “Eagle” and “Meadowlark”(a natural tie-in with Harlem Globetrotters’ star “Meadowlark” Lemon) . Jim’s team was “The Books”, his best player was “Tom Sawyer”.  My team was “The Woods” which had animals like “Fox” and “Badger“ but my best players came from other teams. “Ooroo”, named after an imaginary island in a James Thurber story, played for the “Books” and “Pickle” played for Harry’s “Food” team.

If Harry’s mom came home from grocery shopping, play was stopped so she could take an honorary shot.  She always took it one-handed while clutching a bag of groceries in the other hand. She always made the shot, which always impressed the hell out of us since she was a little Scottish lady who hadn’t grown up with the sport.

When a Canadian kid named Blair moved into the neighborhood he brought hockey sticks and street hockey to Harry’s driveway. We’d played with a tennis ball, which was tough since Harry lived on the side of the hill. Stray shots would bounce and roll forever. I learned to play left-handed since that was the only stick available after the other guys picked. The best games happened when the driveway was slick with new snow or ice and we could slide around, pretending we were skating.

Softball  and wiffleball were played in our backyard . We had our own version of the “Green Monster”.  Our leftfield wall was a tall hedge that bordered  the yard and a neighbor’s driveway.  Rightfield was a poison ivy patch but only Jim was prone to hitting the ball there since he was the only lefty. Centerfield was where the yard started to slope up towards our driveway. A tiny playing field by adult and older kid standards, it was a lot of room to cover for just two players, especially with one guy pitching. So instead of playing two-on-two, John came up with the idea of “Rotation”. One guy batted, one guy pitched and we had a fielder in left or right. Plays didn’t go to first, they went to the mound where the pitcher stepped on a base. This was called “pitcher’s poison.”

Wiffleball was a much more serious affair, played two-on-two, using a “pitchback” . A pitchback was a metal-framed rectangle with a mesh net that a ball would bounce back from for pitching or fielding practice. In our case, any part of it was the strike zone since wiffleball pitches are tough to control and even tougher to impartially call balls and strikes when everybody has something at stake.

Wiffleball was played in our teenage years when the yard was too small by then to play anything else. I had a summer in which I gave up only one hit —that’s right, one hit—the whole summer. After hours of diligent practice I had perfected my main pitch. Thrown perfectly, it would start behind a right-handed batter’s head and break screaming sharply downwards at  the knees over the plate. When it wasn’t perfect, I either walked the batter (a frequent occurrence) or left a large red welt on him, usually on the left thigh, exposed by the shorts we all wore in the mugginess of the Jersey summers.

The day I gave up my one hit that summer came unfortunately on the same day my older brother brought all his high school buddies to play after he’d been bragging me up. John was the one who hit it. To add insult to injury, he hit from his knees since he had a sprained ankle—and it was a home run—over the Green Monster, a feat rarely achieved with a wiffleball. Batting from his knees, my pitch, which normally dove out of a batter’s vision, became a pitch at the belt! How they all laughed—until I resumed my routine of blazing strikeouts, walks, and hit batsmen. I wasn’t a comfortable at-bat the rest of that day, I can say with all the manliness of a devoted wiffleball player. Take that, Nolan Ryan.

It was the pre-videogame era and my parents quite wisely decided not to replace our TV when our old one broke. That meant we did a lot of reading. Ballgames we watched at Harry’s house or on special occasions our parents would rent a TV so we could watch the really big postseason games. We always found something to do.

On rainy days we invented “book” bowling by lining up a bunch of Harry’s hardcover little kid picture books at the end of a long pantry and knocking them down with a rubber ball. We played  “H-O-R-S-E” with a Nerf ball and a wicker laundry hamper. My brothers and I invented “strip field goals” to see who showered first. We’d line up a Nerf football facing a wall in our bedroom and using a sneaker for a tee, try and hit chipshot field goals above the moulding over my desk. If you missed, you removed an item of clothing. In high school, we invented “ceiling ball”, handball played off the ceiling with a tennis ball.

We used to toboggan and sled down the side of Harry’s hill. The course went down the hill, across his driveway and over the curb (where we’d pack snow to form a ramp) and then down a much steeper and longer hill that had a stone wall at the bottom. The little ramp at the curb guaranteed we’d catch air. We’d have to flip the toboggan or sled over before hitting the wall  at the end of the final slope. There was a pine tree we’d sometimes crash into before Harry’s driveway. Not enjoying a faceful of pine needles, John got the bright idea of draping the branches with an old blanket to protect our faces. After a few happy accidents, we eventually ended up intentionally aiming for the blanket which would cover our faces and then—blinded and shrieking with laughter and panic— jump Harry’s driveway to the slope below, hurtling towards the stone wall and our premature demise. We were living out a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon twenty years before Bill Waterston drew it.

One summer we built a tree house in a little tree on Harry’s hill. It was nothing more than wooden platform in the crotch of the tree a few feet off the ground. (We were little, too.) We’d clamber up there and take a position in one of the four lower branches. One day it was just Harry and me. Harry somehow slipped getting into position and ended up hanging upside down, dangling precariously from one foot.  I  laughed hysterically at him squirming there. Red-faced he yelled, “Don’t just sit there laughing! Do something!” So I did. I pushed his other foot off the branch and he fell out of the tree. Hey, it was a drop of like three feet. On soft ground. Oh, he was fine. After he calmed down.

One summer day the four of us came across an empty cardboard refrigerator box. We decided it would be great fun to jump inside, all at the same time, and roll down the hill. It was more like being stuck in a washing machine full of knees and elbows as we yelled “Ow-ow-ow!” all the way down. Crushing it flat, we decided to use it as a sled, pretending the grassy hill was a snowy Olympic course and we were representatives of the different Winter Games powers. I picked West Germany, Harry picked Austria, John picked Norway. Jim, the youngest, decided Saudi Arabia would be his team. We laughed at him but he was ahead of his time: the Jamaican bobsled team of “Cool Runnings” fame  was still some ways off in the distant future.

In the summertime  the girls in the neighborhood joined us for games of “Kick-the-Can” and “Capture-the-Flag” as well as soccer. What was great about our neighborhood is that all the kids roamed freely through everyone else’s yard, no fences or territorial neighbors separated us.

Every summer, my family would vacation in New England where my mom’s family was from. We’d rent the same house every year next door to a house my grandparents would rent in a neighborhood that had its own beach. We’d fill the days swimming or biking around town. Nights were filled with card games and “Murder”, a game my parents invented in college.

To play “Murder” the same number of cards as players are dealt, all low cards with one face card (the Jack of Diamonds) signifying the Detective and one face card (the Ace of Spades) signifying the Murderer. With the exception of the Detective, the other players’ cards and identities are unknown. All the lights are turned out with the Detective staying in the one lit room in the house with the door closed. The other players, including the unknown Murderer, stumble out into the darkened, spooky house( in our case a huge old two-story house with multiple connecting bedrooms and porches and even a back staircase leading into the kitchen). The Murderer picks a moment where he’s sure he’s alone with another player to whisper in their ear,”You’re dead.” The victim then lies down to await discovery as the Murderer makes what he hopes is an unobserved exit from the crime scene. When another player comes across the body, they yell, “Murder! Murder!” All the lights are turned on and the Detective begins his interrogation of all the players to determine who the murderer is. Everyone is required to tell the truth with the exception of the Murderer himself. The Detectives has one chance to guess the Murderer’s identity.

Great fun was had by all. The game was simply a pretext to hide in the dark and scare the crap out of each other. Visiting house guests, in particular, were a favorite target but for us kids, any adult would do. The exception being my dad, who had a special talent for looming out of the darkness over one’s shoulder, silent and grinning, the moonlight reflecting off his glasses. What the neighbors thought of people yelling “Murder! Murder!” at regular intervals all night can only be imagined.

My childhood career as a Vikings and Yankees fan started to fade when the Viking Hall of Fame quarterback Fran Tarkenton retired after the 1978 season, my freshman year in high school. When the Yankees’ captain catcher Thurman Munson was tragically killed in a plane crash in the following summer, my career as a fan and my childhood was definitively over, my idols gone for good.

I traded sports for rock ‘n roll. The posters of Yankees’ and Vikings’ players came down and the posters of rock stars went up. I didn’t watch another football game until December, 1981 when we turned on the TV at a friend’s house, just in time to catch the second half of the Niners-Cowboys NFC title game. My brother Jim and I rooted for the Niners and their young team against our traditional Vikings’ rivals, the hated Dallas Cowboys . My buddy Eddie cheered for the Cowboys. Who knew we’d see “the Catch”, the Montana-Clark play that gave rise to the Niners’ dynasty? We watched the 49ers win the 1982 Super Bowl at Eddie’s house as well. A year later I was living in San Francisco.

I saw the Niners’ 1984 Super Bowl win in a bar but it wasn’t until 1987 that I was able to follow them full-time on TV. It was also the year I became a San Francisco Giants fan. Unsure of whether I’d root for the Giants or A’s (I’d been an American League fan as a Yankee fan), I turned on the Giants’ season opener on the road in San Diego. The Giants’ cleanup hitter, Jeffrey Leonard was being walked intentionally when he reached out and stroked an RBI double. Been a fan ever since.

Over time, with cable-television 24-hour sports-highlight coverage, the ability to see all my teams’ games on television, the subscription to two national sports magazines, I’m pretty well saturated. I have ample opportunity to ask myself what it all means. I get tired of the self-importance, the arrogance, the egos, the greed, the crime, the stupidity of sports and athletes. These failings aren’t unique to sports; musicians, writers, filmmakers, actors and scholars can be just as foolish, immature, competitive and self-aggrandizing as athletes. It’s just that these flaws intrude on our childhood refuge of sports, a time when we could make up the rules to our own games, forget our losses and move on.

Some of my favorite sports memories were the epic games of touch football at the schoolyard with John and his friends. Usually three-on-three or four-on-four. If there was an odd number we used  a “steady”, the extra  player playing quarterback for both teams. Games were usually played on Thanksgiving or in December and January during  winter break. Most of the guys had not been high school athletes but were casual weekend warriors who played the occasional pickup basketball game. John’s friends competed more with humor than athletic ability. One afternoon we were lying around on the grass between games. Someone happened to mention that grasshoppers had ears on their legs. John’s buddy, Aaron lifted his leg and asked, “Is that true?”

One summer evening we were playing late after it had gotten dark. The field was wet and muddy since it rained earlier that day. I was running a pattern over the middle when I collided with two defenders, John and his college roommate, Stan. As I lay there in the mud between them, we all took inventory and none of us were hurt. In the distance I could hear my quarterback, Neil, yelling in despair as the pass rusher finished counting five “Mississippi’”s and closed in on him. Neil heaved a pass blindly into the night. Out of the darkness, the ball descended and landed right on my belly. I clutched it instinctively. Neither John or Stan had noticed. I got up and began sprinting towards the goal line .  Belatedly, John and Stan  began to chase me but they were laughing so hard in surprise at my catch in the dark, they were unable to recover in time.

The final touch football game was a five-hour affair in two feet of snow.  Four-on-four plus a “steady” quarterback. We were playing zone defenses after a series of pick plays destroyed man coverage for either team. It ended fittingly with a touchdown pass caught by the worse guy on the field to tie it up at 84-all.

It was actually at one of these touch football games that I discovered losing the game was not the end of the world. That I had had a great time—despite the fact that my team lost.  Roger Angell recounted in his superlative piece on the 1975 World Series that the Reds’ Pete Rose—as ultra-competitive as any athlete who ever lived—turned to Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk in the tenth inning of Game Six and remarked, “Say, this is some kind of game, isn’t it?”

There’s a park near my house that has three Little League diamonds and a football field with a track where I go for  a walk with my younger brother sometimes. The Little League teams seem to play nearly year round: spring, summer and fall. It’s a very hard-core area for Little League baseball; a nearby town sent a team to the Little League World Series where they lost in the semi-final round. The kids are always be drilled by very serious coaches. The diamonds are groomed year-round by devoted adult volunteers. (God forbid, you should play a casual game of catch out there.) The stands and the parking lots are packed with families during games and even during practices. I commented to my brother that at our games we were lucky to draw twenty people; that the fields were ragged, full of chuckholes where you could sprain an ankle; the infields were especially bad, rocks and bottle caps made sliding a hazardous proposition. My brother said maybe people cared more about parenting these days. I said, “Maybe.  But if the kids didn’t wear uniforms, if they made up new teams every day, if they didn’t keep track of wins and losses, would all these parents still turn out to watch?” I’m not someone who thinks everyone deserves a trophy; but I do sometimes wonder why trophies and awards and keeping score is so all-important and all-consuming.

What makes the movie Bull Durham so great isn’t that it’s about baseball or sex, or baseball as a metaphor for life or baseball as a metaphor for sex. It’s about dealing with failure, not just adversity, but failure. The best hitters in the world fail seven out of ten times. Kevin Costner’s character, the veteran minor league catcher Crash Davis, tries to explain to his team’s young phenom pitcher, Nuke LaLoosh, that just one more hit a week( “a dying quail, a groundball with eyes”) is what separates the career minor leaguer and the guy who gets called up to the Show. And what makes Bull Durham unique among sports movies is that there is no Big Game (or Big Race or Big Boxing Match) where the hero has his redemptive moment, overcomes that final obstacle and seizes the prize. Instead, we get anti-climax: the dimwitted but likable phenom Nuke La Loosh gets the Call to the big leagues and the veteran Crash Davis is told he is being cut by the team.

Crash tries to impart some final wisdom to Nuke before he leaves. “Stay cocky and arrogant even when you’re getting beat. Fear and arrogance, that’s the secret,” he says, almost more to himself than to Nuke. We spend the last twenty minutes of the film with Crash as he tries to figure out what to do next.  Crash, the failure, is the hero of the story. He’s the one who is easier for most of us to identify with, rather than Nuke, the kid with the “ten-cent head and million-dollar arm”.  We can’t always control whether we succeed or fail; and most of us are going to fail–or at least fall short of the dreams we had for ourselves when we were younger. What we can control is how we deal with that failure, gracefully or with bitterness.

Occasionally, you will hear pro athletes—usually after an exciting see-saw win—say it was just like being a kid again, in the backyard or on the playground.  When the joy of playing hadn’t been superseded yet by money and fame and competition. And that’s just it. When you’re a kid, you aspire to the big leagues, the pros. But for the guys that actually make it at the highest level, it’s when they’re lost in the moment, playing like kids again, that sports become transcendent and joyous and the game has finally come back full circle.