Growing up in Queens, New York, my heart belonged to the
Brooklyn Dodgers, one of three big league baseball teams in the Big Apple. It was out of the question to root for the
Yankees. With their pinstripe uniforms,
they seemed more to be businessmen than ball players. The Giants weren't in it. The
Dodgers didn't actually win all that many games, so being a fan required a
stout heart and a strong stomach. When I
moved to Cambridge for college and graduate school, I inherited the Boston Red
Sox, who were, if anything, worse. The
Curse of the Babe hung over the team like the permanent cloud over Joe Btfsplk,
the bad luck character in L'il Abner. Every Spring, the Sox would get off to a
great start, sometimes even topping the Yankees in the rankings, but come late
summer, they would go into their patented predictable fade. It
took real character to be a Red Sox fan, character for which being a
Dodgers fan was great training. We Sox
fans wore our inevitable disappointments like battle ribbons. scorning Yankees
supporters as fair weather fans.
Somehow, as I have aged, I have lost my edge, and now, in my
eighties, I find I that I have sunk lower than a Yankees fan in my enthusiasms
and allegiances. It all started with
Tiger Woods. So long as he was tearing
up the links, I was a rabid supporter, despite hating the game to which he had
dedicated his life. But once he began to
go downhill [roughly at the time that his picture book marriage broke up
because of his compulsive philandering], I lost interest. So I transferred my loyalties to Venus
Williams [thereby also switching games, but since I am only a spectator, who
cares?] Lately, it is her little sister
Serena who has totally captured my heart.
Just today, I watched her crush Azarenka to make it to the Semis at
Wimbledon.
I have done a good deal of soul-searching about my feckless
fickleness, and I have come up with an explanation that is, no surprise, political
and ideological in its roots. So far as
I can work it out, what is going on is this:
I really, really care about what happens in the world -- the exploitation,
the oppression, the discrimination, the hideous unending brutality -- but there is, to be honest, virtually
nothing I can do about the evils I so profoundly hate. Sports offers an alternative world in which
the passions run as high but the outcome really
does not matter at all.
I mean, deep down, I just don't care if the Sox lose a game
or Woods hits a bogie or Serena double faults.
When my team or my star is winning, I can cheer to the echo. When they lose, I can turn off the TV set and
forget about it instantly. That is, for
me, the real attraction of sports. It
just does not matter at all.
So I will be rooting for Serena Williams to beat Maria
Sharapova in the semis, but if, as is always possible, she loses, I will turn
off the set and go about my business without a second thought. Alas,
it is not so easy to put the real ills of the world out of my mind.
4 comments:
Strange - I was just the opposite. If my hero struck out and/or if my team lost, it would ruin my entire week. So I gave up rooting for individuals/teams entirely. But that was a million years ago. Maybe now the results wouldn't matter to me.
You are a lucky man. A bad sporting result ruins my mood for at least a few hours. And I tend to go for the underdog, so I am really rooting for Tiger these days. He is too good for it to end like this.
How about your chess interest. Apart from your son, who else did you follow!?
My son got interested in chess, at age 4, because he saw me following the great Fischer Spassky world championship match on the TV, with my chess board set up on the familyroom table. But I was not a chess nut. I was a patzer, and actually at that point was more interested in Go than in chess. Once Patrick started playing, of course, he was the only person I "followed."
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