Not all Penn Staters are sports crazed.
Take my opinion-writing class. I devoted two weeks of the course to sports columns, figuring they’d be sure-fire crowd pleasers.
They weren’t.
We read mostly baseball stuff, to coincide with the playoffs and the World Series:
Red Smith’s classic about the Bobby Thomson home run that gave the Giants the National League pennant in 1951; Peter Gammons’ tribute to the Carlton Fisk round-tripper that kept the Red Sox alive in the 1975 World Series; Shirley Povich and Thomas Boswell on the ends of Lou Gehrig’s and Cal Ripken’s consecutive-games streaks.
Even Bob Greene’s column on Michael Jordan was about the basketball star’s unsuccessful attempt at a second career on the diamond.
The only non-baseball piece we read was Jim Murray’s ode to Arnold Palmer, he who “could go in the rough and smash a ball out of debris so thick that the ball, chunks of rock, cans, bottles, a few squirrels, tree trunks and parts of old Volkswagens would come flying out together.”
Grumped one of my young scholars: “This was extremely boring. I don’t know anything about golf and neither do most people…”
I don’t know much about golf either. My contention was that a good writer will get you interested in a subject you didn’t think you cared about.
But I hadn’t considered the context problem. Sports columns are meant to be read by fans of that sport around the time the people and events under discussion are newsworthy, not decades later in an anthology of great newspaper columns.
Red Smith’s readers didn’t have to be told that baseball towered over the sports landscape in 1951, or that New York’s Giants and Brooklyn’s Dodgers weren’t just playing for the National League pennant but for the right to contest the Yankees’ claim as the best team in the Big Apple.
Peter Gammons’ readers didn’t have to be told what he meant by Fred Lynn “driving a Gary Nolan kumquat” into the bleachers, or Johnny Bench becoming the second member of the Reds “to tickle The Wall.”
The baseball-averse and baseball-indifferent readers in my class were lost. My thesis was being severely tested. Perhaps if I backed up a step and got them to appreciate sports, they would appreciate the columns.
This was a switch. Usually, I’m the guy who’s arguing against the hyper-inflated importance of sports in our society.
Now, instead of being tickled that I was among students who agreed with me, I wanted to make them aware of the feelings of joy and unity that rooting for a team can elicit.
And so I turned to the Teacher’s Friend – YouTube. We don’t have to only read about Bobby Thomson’s home run. We can watch it — and hear it: “The Giants win the pennant!” (repeat three times).
Part of what’s striking about the clip is how it dissolves time. The world of 1951 is different from the world of today in countless ways, but a walk-off home run then looks identical to a walk-off home run now.
More than the mad pirouette of Giants manager Leo Durocher, coaching at third base, or Thomson’s landing on home plate with both feet and disappearing into the embrace of his delirious teammates, I wanted my class to savor the reaction of the crowd.
We see a woman in cat’s-eye sunglasses shaking her fleshy arms over her head in a hallelujah gesture. Then she claps her palm over her mouth repeatedly like we did when we were kids playing at being “Indians.”
Moments later, we see a young guy with a victory cigar clenched between his teeth and his arms stretched straight out in a V.
Then there’s a chubby guy pumping his right arm like he’s got a martini shaker in his paw. Next to him is a guy who is laughing like he’s just heard the best joke ever.
“They’re going crazy!” cries Giants play-by-play man Russ Hodges, and their craziness, in 1951, tells us that our current adoration of sports is not some latter-day descent into triviality – just as the lunatic behavior of soccer fans in the rest of the world tells us that this is not a uniquely American phenomenon.
I’m tickled that not everyone comes to Penn State to obsess over the Nittany Lions. I certainly don’t want those who don’t jump into that culture with both feet, a la Bobby Thomson, to feel like they don’t belong here.
But just as I would like the sports crazies to obsess a little less, I would like the non-sports people to, no, not obsess a little more, but at least try to understand what all the fuss is about.
