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During a day of ennui,
a sports fan ruminates
of TheColumnists.com
It was one of those
lazy, lounging Sunday afternoons. Wife Janet was out doing her
antique hunting. Kids and grandkids had all returned home safely
after over-dosing and dozing during the Thanksgiving weekend.
The first football game of the day, a surprising Jets win over
the Houston Texans, was over. The surprising Giants loss to the
Tennessee Titans had not yet begun.
What is a sports freak to do?
Yogi Berra was experting a bio pic movie on Ty Cobb on the Yankee
television station and talking heads were analyzing the college
football lineup for the January 8 championship game between Ohio
State and Florida on the Mets station.
No interest.
A couple of old movies filled the stations. Saw them all.
A boring book covered the night stand.
A sandwich had been eaten, a diet soda drunk and a breakfast
muffin had filled me up.
What to do, what to do?
Flip, flip, flip. An old movie, a soap opera, a Seinfeld repeat
with racist Kramer, a history special on how new guns won World
War II. Blah, blah, blah.
Then, on one of the major networks, believe it or not, was a
tough, bitter, intense, vicious match of curling.
I had heard a bit about curling during the last winter Olympics
and I even knew a few people who actually played the game at
the Ardsley Country Club rink in Westchester County, New York,
where I used to live. They said it was fun to play and the beer
and cheeses afterwards were a kick.
I watched for several minutes as men and women actually got down
on the ice, on their knees, and brushed madly so a round sphere,
a rock they called it, could glide gracefully into another rock.
Three points, two points, one point. The announcer was breathless
with excitement and unexplaining. If you watched you were supposed
to know.
I remember the first televised baseball game I saw in 1947, the
Brooklyn Dodgers against the New York Yankees. Much fun.
Then a year later on my neighbor’s eight inch screen we
gathered on the floor for a heavyweight championship fight, Joe
Louis against Jersey Joe Wolcott. Louis knocked out Walcott in
the 11th round.
I convinced my father I could save a dollar a week from my paper
route money and help out with the purchase of a television set.
A few months later, Christmas time maybe, a television set was
brought into the house by my father. I could keep my paper route
money.
It was a used set, picked up at some neighborhood hardware store,
for $20 or so. It meant the world to me.
There were baseball players on that screen at regular times,
especially Saturday afternoons. There were football players in
the fall and basketball players from colleges across the country
whose names I had never heard until then.
Then I saw the golfers and the tennis players and the wrestlers.
Oh, how we loved the wrestlers. There was Gorgeous George and
Killer Kowalski and so many other brutes with colorful names.
One of them, Jesse Ventura, even became a governor and I think
that did more for wrestling and maybe more for politics than
anything else I can remember.
There were World Series games on television before I knew it
and something called a Super Bowl and amazing basketball adventures,
mostly by a guy named Michael Jordan.
There were hockey players trying to stay out of fights and tennis
players getting into them.
There were summer Olympic games from Moscow without Americans
and winter Olympic games from historic cities named Sarejevo.
There was something called "Wide World of Sports" that
brought games and contestants from every imaginable spot on the
globe.
I learned more geography and more history from watching Wide
World of Sports than I ever learned in Miss Kuhlenberg’s
seventh grade class in junior high school.
I learned a lot about hate and bitterness, terrorism and violence,
in the summer games from Munich in 1972. Jim McKay and Howard
Cosell hardly had to stand aside when the big news guys took
over that story.
There were swimmers and gymnasts and polo players and archers
all competing for my time from world cities and historic sites.
There was, for seven years, a biker named Lance Armstrong, reminding
us all that there is more to that first thrill of a three and
then a two wheeler out of your own garage.
It all came down to that great invention of the 20th century,
the television set, the sound and the glory, all capturing the
competition of sports from around the block and around the world.
As a participant and as a spectator I always realized that sports
sends out messages of pleasure and joy in so many forms.
You can catch a game or a contest 24 hours a day now from local
sites or world capitals. We’ll all be in China, walking
the wall, in 2008, by the glories of the set.
The curling match may not have been a thriller for me but some
people watched it all. Some probably even bought the products
they were pushing in between pushing the rocks.
The state of sports is strong. That’s what I learned on
a lazy, lounging Sunday afternoon. The nap was well earned.
©2006 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This
column first posted Dec. 4, 2006.
You
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