This Sporting Life

I have never been athletic, or ambitious to be so. Between native uncoordination, what amounts to monocular vision, due to great imbalance in the strength of my eyes, and a disinclination to any sort of competition, no accomplishment in sports ever was likely for me. Nevertheless, I retain a great fondness for baseball, probably because it was the one game that neighborhood informal games made available to me without stress or much embarrassment. At organized baseball, I was a dud.

I like to watch baseball still, preferably games locally where I can sit in the stands and enjoy all of the game, including the audience, the vendors, the play on the field. I don’t much care for watching on television. I can’t follow the changes in position of the players as each batter comes up, the almost kabuki-like interplay between umpire and players, the conferences between catcher and pitcher when at some moment indiscernible to me, the umpire almost reaches the mound to end the conference, only to have the catcher and pitcher magically part without a word spoken.

I thought of this today as I read a poem that had been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” back on May 2nd, titled “Little League,” by Paul Hostovsky. A father watches a game with his daughter, and they exchange smiles over the rituals of baseball, from the sweeping of home plate by the umpire, to the production from his capacious pockets of new balls following fouls. The poem concludes after this little ceremony, with the lines:

. . . the ump has dipped his hand
into his bottomless black pocket
and conjured up a shiny new white one
like a brand new coin
from behind the catcher’s ear,
which he then gives to the catcher
who seems to contain his surprise
though behind his mask his eyes are surely
as wide with wonder as hers.

Watching my grandchildren play T-ball and softball gives me the same joy and wonder. This is how I play baseball, through observation by myself, and shared by my family. Some days we simply enjoy, some days we have hot dogs, and some days it rains.

The Joys of Ball Games

If I set the Wayback Machine to thirty years ago, I can see my sons rounding the bases and chasing fly balls in the short outfields of first T-Ball then Dixie Youth Baseball. These were happy times sitting  in the bleachers at Senter Field on Lookout Mountain. (No, not Center Field, the field was named after Nick Senter, major supporter of Dixie Youth on the Mountain.) Both boys grew to men retaining their interest in baseball.

Energy to burn

Now there are grandchildren, a girl and a boy, six and four, respectively, playing softball and T-Ball. We have been to see games, and will again on into the summer. T-Ball and Softball are even better with grandchildren to watch.

For their parents, three or four games a week at far-flung parks mean long evenings following long working days for both. They are the best of parents, though, and even help coach the T-Ball team. They keep volunteering for things. I am proud of them both, they are giving their children a gift beyond price, of infinite meaning for the rest of their young lives. They are giving their time and participation. I love my sons, I love my daughter-in-law (I always wondered what having a daughter would be like, and now I know – wonderful.) I love the grandchildren

Mommy urging him on, Daddy carries bat.

immoderately, as does their Granny Babs, and we agree that this is the best of times,  among many good times, watching the girls and boys of summer.

Play Ball!

When Things Go Well…

…it is usually because hard-working people plan and execute well. I spent most of the morning watching probably the best-run event ever on the riverfront here in Chattanooga. For the second year, rowers from around the country gathered for the Head of the Hooch regatta, with hundreds of boats and a thousand or more rowers. This event for many years was held in Atlanta, but with the completion of our river front parks and other projects, the Atlanta Rowing Club partnered with the Chattanooga Rowing Club to put on this event. Apparently all comments amongst the participants have been so positive we may expect this event to be here for a long time.

I was staggered at the scale, the variety of boats, people and activities. Seeing all the young (and not so young, rowing is a lifetime activity for some) people, spent with a three-mile race, hauling their boats up the ramp from the river following the race was awe-inspiring for me.

I took many pictures, a very few of which you can find here .

My Brilliant Wrestling Career

Mr. Somerset Maugham, a writer of fiction with some reputation in his time, wrote a sort of literary autobiography titled The Summing Up late in his life. Since Mr. Maugham was a literary person, his autobiography was full of literary detail. What he thought about writing, writers and related subjects.As I have grown older, especially since I turned 60, I more and more think that Mr. Maugham’s title has a much broader application than one exclusively appropriate for a literary person. Literary persons write down stories, stories which are fictional, but draw extensively on their own lives. Each person does the same, without necessarily writing things down, as they look back on their lives and try to fit things into perspective, tell themselves stories about their lives to explain themselves to their own fractured understanding. I have increasingly looked backwards to sift though my life events to understand what I was, what I made of myself, and how much I understood or did not understand about what was happening to me.

Lately, I have been revising the version I told myself for many years about my uneasy dealings with my seventh-grade math teacher, Luther T. Worsham, known as “Major Worsham” in the military school in which I found myself newly enrolled in my twelfth year. “The Maj” disapproved of me. I must say right now that he was entirely right.

There. Now I have said it. Forty years of dissembling to myself and making excuses, right out the window. That is what “summing up” should be like. Failure was my perverse punishment of myself for being the child of divorce in a time (mid-fifties) in the last century when divorce was shamefully admitted and rather rare.

Major Worsham disapproved of me, but he did not act in a cruel way towards me. In my self-pitying adolescent self I believed differently. He saw my abandonment of my abilities in a waste of undeserved angst as a terrible indulgence and injustice to myself. In my narrowness, I thought this mean and lacking in compassion. I thought the man was a bully, and insensitive. I was partly wrong.

Luke had an explosive temper and a tendency to get physical. He made free use of a paddle in those days in the ’50s of the last century. I never incurred that particular punishment, being sorry, but not smart-aleck. Many others did.

As I made my erratic and fumbling way through Baylor, I became interested in going out for wrestling. I was no athlete, prone to mistakes which made me unpopular with teammates in football and baseball. Wrestling, though, was one-on-one, and I thought I would like it. In order to “go out” for wrestling, I needed to ask Coach Worsham’s permission. This I finally nerved myself up to do, one cool fall day on the quadrangle on the hill, intercepting my nemesis as he left the dining hall. Coach Worsham listened to my request with his eyes on the ground, looking grim. Then he glanced up and said, “All right. We’ll work hard. See you Monday.” I stood there, absurdly empty of feeling, all my dread fallen away, but without exhilaration. If this was an uplifting, “feelgood” sort of story, I would be able to recount a long struggle to overcome my limitations, finally triumphing in a Big Match where I vindicated myself before an admiring Coach Worsham.

Didn’t happen. I spent four years sweating on a large mat with forty other boys, working harder than I ever had in my life. But I never wrestled a match. I tried out a few times, losing badly each time, but Luther T. Worsham never reproached me for taking up space on his mat. I had tried. Not everybody who tries succeeds, but trying itself is worth something. That is the one thing that I took from my wrestling non-career.

And forty-five years later, it is the thing I would like to thank Luke Worsham for. He is dead, so all I can do is write this overlong lament. The great tragedy of life is that you often know too late what you should have said, and can only pass on your sense of necessary deeds omitted.

Thank you, Luke.

Seeking Redemption

In the Chattanooga Times Free Press this morning, in the Metro section, there is a story on the efforts of the UTC football players cleared of rape charges to re-establish their eligibilty under NCAA rules:

Five of the six former UTC football players cleared of rape charges last month have asked the university to restore their NCAA eligibility so they can play at other colleges, officials said.

The charges of rape against the six former UTC athletes were dismissed Jan. 18 after a judge found insufficient evidence to bind the case over to a grand jury. The players are waiting to hear the results of a university conduct hearing that will determine whether they are readmitted as students or permanently expelled.

This is on the face of it, a question of fairness following acquittal under rape charges. In the course of the trial, however, most of the players acknowledged, I believe, that they engaged in group sex with the young woman who brought the charges. Is such behavior of itself likely to be a bar to scholarships elsewhere, or at UTC?

Ponderous. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Link

(Go to Metro on sidebar menu)

Why and when baseball died for me

I grew up with the usual shoebox of baseball cards under my bed. I am convinced to this day that I had a Mickey Mantle rookie card in that shoebox, and that my mother ruined my life by throwing it out when I went to college.

I struggled with actually playing ball, being athletically challenged. Not just lack of coordination, but bone laziness as well. It took me many years, well into chronological adulthood, before I realized that there were no shortcuts not involving hard work, if you wanted to accomplish something worthwhile.

I did make a fitful sort of effort at baseball in school. I was a weak hitter, an uncertain fielder, and could throw only poorly. Apart from those things, I was a natural.

One afternoon as my ninth-grade baseball group endured a late-spring scratch game, overseen by our coach, I came to bat. It was late in an unseasonably hot day, the boys were tired and ready to go to the locker room. The sides were tied, and the coach said the game had to be played out before we could go to the showers. The other side scored a run, it was the bottom of the ninth, we had last bat. At intervals, the coach had stopped the game to give us pointers about the game. Just before I came to bat, he had stressed that once we hit the ball, our only concern was to run to first as fast as we could, remembering to cross the base and turn to the right, then tag up. Watching our hit sail into the field was not productive.

I heard my teammates calling as I approached the plate, “Ah, here comes Felix, now we can go to the gym, he’s an easy out. Good old Felix!” I dug in at the plate, determined to prove them wrong. A couple of pitches, a couple of strikes, my teammates were laughing and cheering, “Good old Felix, we knew he could do it.” The next pitch came toward the plate, I swung, and connected. The ball bounced through the gap, and I was digging for first, running as hard as I could, not looking where the ball was going, following the coach’s directions to the letter. I crossed the bag, turned right and tagged up. Guys on the bench were groaning, players in the field were kicking the dirt, I was a goat…but I was safe. I looked around, saw the pitcher step to the mound, fielders assuming their positions, and decided to take a small lead off of first. As soon as my foot left the bag, the first baseman whipped out his glove with the bootlegged ball still in it, and tagged me out. The cheers were raucous and derisive. “Good old Felix, we knew he could do it.”

The coach was a good and decent man. He tried to make his voice heard over the noise of the laughing and cheering, “He did exactly right, he ran hard for first, he tagged up. He did what he was supposed to do.” The boys ran for the gym. I collected my gear and followed. The coach awkwardly slapped my back.

Baseball was over.